Modern data protection must be compliant, secure and resilient; not only to pass audits, but to recover with confidence. For most organizations, managing compliance, risk, and security can be a time-consuming, and complex challenge. This is because businesses are impacted every day by internal and external factors that affect growth, strategy and survival. Whether it’s a new regulation to adhere to, a new advancement in technology or even the scare of a cyberattack, it’s critical to have a modern IT strategy that continues to evolve with business and includes its people and processes.
Compliance, governance, and risk are all factors organizations need to address, whether big or small. Think of compliance as the ongoing governance and management of risk. Making sure the data you are managing and storing meets the proper quality and integrity standards. With business continuity and regulatory assurance prioritized, you need to have visibility, control and automation.
How can organizations manage all the factors that can affect compliance, risk, and security? The first step is addressing what needs to be done. This could be clear documentation from stakeholders about what is required and expected. Then we need to consider everything that goes into meeting these requirements, this is where people, processes and technology come in. Lastly, we need to have ongoing testing and evaluation, looking for gaps, addressing policy changes, and assessing the technology currently being used to ensure it’s evolving with the business landscape.
Veeam Data Platform aligns with compliance and risk management through automation, observability, and security features. We need to protect our data, but we also need to recover cleanly so our organization is resilient. Let’s discuss how Veeam Data Platform delivers these capabilities.
Observability and Reporting
Observability helps with compliance by providing real-time visibility into system performance, data flows and infrastructure behavior. This visibility into your virtual and backup infrastructure is crucial for meeting regulatory compliance. This allows you to track, document, and address potential vulnerabilities in your environment. When it comes to compliance, it’s not one report, but a set of dashboards and reports designed to cover audit, security posture, and SLA adherence.
Veeam ONE, a key component of Veeam Data Platform, provides different dashboards that provide at-a-glance views of your environment. These analytics have been integrated throughout the platform, meaning you have access to curated dashboards, reports and all compliance-related activities all in one unified interface.
The Veeam Threat Center acts as a central hub, providing you with a Data Platform Scorecard consisting of how your environment is doing with security compliance, recovery health, protection status, and immutability status. Veeam Threat Center is integrated with Coveware’s Recon Scanner, allowing you to get insights and create actionable alarms that flow into your standard notification and incident tools
Now you can drill down into the affected workload, review context and trigger notifications or remediation actions. This provides a single place to view, triage and act on Recon findings, helping improve overall data resilience.
Alarms allow you to get notified about system failures, unauthorized access attempts and irregular system behaviors. This helps manage overall risk, ensuring your environment is performing as designed, and controlled, as expected.
The Veeam ONE reporting engine provides the proper documentation on your environment, ensuring you’re audit-ready for any situation. By utilizing the different reports available, you can show how effective your data protection strategy is, identify SLA violations and address areas for improvement. With granular filtering options, you can adjust the report to meet your needs. Easily receive documentation on restore activity, configuration, data protection, and immutability status through the different reports available.
Security and Access Controls
Meeting compliance means that only authorized individuals have access to certain data. By configuring different roles within the backup infrastructure, you can ensure that only individuals authorized to manage backup data have access. Create custom roles within your backup environment that limit what data can be backed up, where it can be stored, what type of restores can be performed, and the restore location.
The Security & Compliance Analyzer identifies risks in your environment. Utilizing this built-in analyzer and the Backup Security Compliance Report, you can receive documentation on all your backup server configurations, ensuring they follow best practices for the OS and backup infrastructure components.
Immutability is key in managing risk and can be a part of meeting your compliance requirements. For this, I always suggest the Immutable Workloads Report, as this is going to show you exactly how many restore points are immutable, and what workloads are protected with immutable backups, while providing the key documentation you can share with stakeholders.
Automation & Veeam Intelligence
It’s not news that automation can streamline processes, validate configurations and save time. Through standardizing backup deployments, you can avoid human error and build a repeatable foundation across your environment. Through the Veeam Software Appliance, you gain a pre-hardened appliance with automated patching, strengthening security posture, reducing risk and simplifying compliance. This, coupled with Veeam Updater, can ensure your backup appliance receives and applies mandatory updates. For operating system and security updates, these will be installed automatically and cannot be skipped or cancelled. The same goes for Veeam Backup & Replication security updates, allowing you to ensure your environment is always on the latest, most secure release.
Veeam Intelligence provides you with immediate insights on what is happening in your environment. Through its evolution, it has become increasingly useful, allowing you to ask it questions and run reports directly in the chatbot window. This can save so much time, as you don’t have to manually search through all the reports, it can supply the correct report to you instantaneously. To add to this, the Data Resilience Summary Report, powered by Veeam Intelligence, will aggregate job outcomes, group errors by workload for instant triage, and add context-aware recommendations with links to trusted KBs and guides. This will help you avoid compliance and security pitfalls, as you will be able to be proactive in fixing issues based on recommendations.
Recoverability and Testing
When it comes to your data, it’s important that when you need it, it’s available. This is where recoverability comes in. We need to be proactive about recovery testing. Veeam Data Platform has a couple of options available to you when it comes to testing recoverability. You can use SureBackup for recovery verification, which can be scheduled manually or automatically. This operates in two different modes; the first is full recoverability testing. This mode runs machines in an isolated environment directly from backups and performs tests against live applications. This ensures the recoverability of your production workloads in a disaster recovery event. The second mode, backup verification and content scan only, performs backup integrity checks and content analysis to detect traces of malware or any other unwanted sensitive data. This test doesn’t require setting up a virtual lab or application group. Each mode helps ensure that you can recover clean data when you need it.
Taking it one step further, you can have full automated DR testing. This is configured through Veeam Recovery Orchestrator, included in Veeam Data Platform Premium. This allows you to schedule end-to-end failover tests with runbooks, change control and approvals to prove repeatable recovery. When disaster does strike, clean rooms enable you to validate that restore points are free of threats, without exposing risk to your production environment.
Compliant, Secure, and Resilient All Go Hand in Hand
Veeam is continuously investing, innovating, and adding industry and regulatory credentials to help ensure your data is protected and secure. Veeam maintains a security certification program, ensuring you feel confident with compliance controls, policies and practices. You can view all Veeam’s certifications through the Veeam Trust Center.
Throughout this blog, we discussed how Veeam Data Platform empowers organizations to meet compliance through its observability, security, automation, and recoverability testing. Through this, you can ensure you understand systems, processes and operations, with the added benefit of predefined and customizable reports. By implementing customizable roles and authorizations, you can ensure your data is being managed based on your organization’s protocols. Lastly, with the ability to ensure recoverability through on-demand or scheduled testing, you can make sure it’s available in any disaster scenario. Compliance can be complex, but with Veeam and its capabilities, we make sure it becomes easier. Learn more about Veeam’s Compliance capabilities here.