It’s no secret that more and more organizations are moving to a multi-cloud approach. Production workloads that were traditionally contained in on-premises data centers are rapidly being dispersed into public hyperscale clouds such as AWS and Azure. This creates a great opportunity for organizations and IT departments to become more agile, secure and cost effective, but also creates a challenge for cloud and managed service providers that are called upon to remotely protect the data that resides in these public clouds.
Veeam Service Provider Console v5 was introduced in February of 2021 and was built upon previous releases to allow Veeam service providers further reach into their customers’ environments, offering them the ability to drive new service offerings around physical and cloud-based workloads. One new key feature of Veeam Service Provider Console was the capability of leveraging the built-in public cloud plug-ins in Veeam Backup & Replication v11, extending to the protection of customer workloads residing in AWS and Azure.
Why this matters
It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone in the managed services industry that workloads that have traditionally lived on-premises are moving into public cloud platforms. Generally speaking, this has been a top-down directive where a CIO/CEO has driven the hype around the public cloud and what it can offer. In the technical world, when a strategy is driven from the top down, without validation or cause, that can lead to issues.
What we have seen is a lift and shift approach to workloads moving from on-premises or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms “as-is” to public cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure. The results of this are a number of on-premises hypervisor-based VM instances migrating to EC2 or Azure VMs. These instances, now living in the public cloud, have the potential to not be managed in the same way as what they had been on-premises.
While Veeam makes is easy to migrate VMs from one platform to the other through our workload mobility feature, managed service providers need a way to continue to have awareness and control of their managed machines no matter where they are located.
Harnessing the power of the plug-ins
With the release of Veeam Backup & Replication v10a, the first public cloud plug-in for AWS was also released. This allowed the management, monitoring and deployment of Veeam Backup for AWS through the Veeam Backup & Replication console. The feature had a secondary benefit whereby managed service providers were able to regain control of workloads that have moved to the public cloud. This is done via integration with Veeam Service Provider Console v5.
The easiest way to describe how this benefits managed service providers is to think of a typical customer. They may have a local vSphere environment with 20 VMs servicing a number of business-critical applications and services which are all under management. They are backed up via Veeam Backup & Replication which use Cloud Connect Backup to send backup data up into the managed service providers cloud storage.
A directive then goes out by an application vendor that they will only support their product if it is housed within AWS, meaning five of the VMs are to be migrated to EC2. With the VM/VMs migrated into EC2, previous agentless backups can’t be used and existing Veeam Backup & Replication backup policies can’t be applied. At this point, Veeam Backup for AWS needs to be leveraged to perform the snapshots and backups to Amazon S3 restore points of these new EC2 instances.
Prior to the Service Provider Console v5 ability to tap into the public cloud plug-in capability of Veeam Backup & Replication, the managed service provider would have had to manually track the VMs that were migrated to EC2. Further to that, they wouldn’t have been able to be aware of the backup policies and be able to bill for those services.
Conclusion
Without Veeam Service Provider Console v5, awareness and control of previously-managed workloads as they move to AWS or Azure wasn’t possible. In addition to that, this feature opens new revenue streams for managed service providers to tap into which might not have existed previously. As new customers onboard with workloads spread across on-premises or public cloud platforms… or for that matter, situations where whole applications are stored within public clouds, it now becomes possible to generate revenue streams and capture a piece of the market that may have not been possible before. Visit Veeam.com to download the FREE Veeam Service Provider Console and start offering Veeam-powered, remote-managed BaaS and DRaaS services today!
