In my previous blog, we walked through Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows configurations and ways it provides for backing up data on travelers’ laptops to a cloud provider. Now should you need to recover your data, let’s see how to do it and which options you have with Veeam Agent.

One of the best things about Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows is the ability to back up to and restore from one of the many Veeam Cloud Service Providers. This functionality opens up a new use case for Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows, the business traveler.

In recent years we have all been hearing about cloud transformation. Many organizations already adopt such a strategy, but we still don’t see the large organizations move to all or full cloud strategies.

For some businesses, cloud is a cost saver when they move or run the workload from the cloud. For many other organizations, especially the large ones, an all-cloud strategy is not the best fit. Many things force them to keep and run most of their workload from an on-premises data center. If we look at today’s data centers, we realize that the data center is mostly running on top of a virtualization layer which introduces the basics of the hybrid cloud.

Networking has always been one of the most complex parts of any IT solution, and whether you are connecting into a remote site, connecting branch offices together or extending on-premises networks to the cloud, there is traditionally a high level of complexity and cost that's involved in establishing a reliable networking solution. When it comes to networking during a disaster, the level of complexity and margin for error is magnified. In relative terms, it has become easy to back up, replicate and then recover workloads, but getting access to those recovered systems remains a cumbersome process.

Veeam produces the world’s best Availability solutions. Over the last two years, our customers have become increasingly interested in Availability solutions in the cloud, specifically in Microsoft Azure. Veeam has always been and continues to be hardware agnostic. We always let our customers choose their preferred hardware, or in this case cloud provider. With that said, Veeam has built six show-stopping innovations for our customers who are looking to use Veeam with Microsoft Azure to strengthen their Availability story in the hybrid cloud.

Today most big storage providers offer some form of long-term physical tape library storage, which enables customers to utilize a cost-efficient cold storage option. But, there can be a few key issues faced with physical tape library storage. The first is complexity that surrounds exportation and management. The second is the cost of upgrading – old tapes are slow and unreliable but new ones are not cheap.

As a flight instructor, I always advise my students to avoid the cumulonimbus cloud, which is associated with thunderstorms that create unpredictable conditions and make flying difficult and dangerous. Throughout a 100 years of aviation history, flying in or near this type of weather often makes headlines in the news; with some instances worse than others.

When discussing cloud strategies with Veeam customers, from migration to data backup to the cloud, I am reminded of the unpredictable weather conditions associated with flying in the clouds, especially when a customer raises a concern about the cost of cloud computing.

Cloud is a viable option for many use cases, including but not limited to storage, critical workload management, disaster recovery and much more. And as we have covered in our previous concerns related to this series, it can also be made secure, reasonably priced, and migration can be simplified. We found one of the major cloud concerns in last year’s end user survey to be customization. Let’s dive into where customization and the cloud meet.

In this cloud blog series, we’ve talked about how secure backups can be in a cloud environment and what the cost may be of not leveraging the potential of DRaaS. The next step would be to start thinking about how to migrate your infrastructure or backups/replicas to the cloud and at what scale it has to be done. We will review the main points that you need to consider and check prior to initiating your move into the world of cloud.

Cloud computing is hardly a new player of the IT world. Its ever-growing market share and popularity within the IT community derives from combining flexible prices with the Always-On Availability of infrastructure resources. It brings out a whole new world of possibilities for your business, while reducing the long-term costs of maintaining your own infrastructure. Yet, despite the obvious cost advantages of moving data to the cloud, pricing is still a top concern, as Veeam discovered from our recent 2016 cloud end-user survey (see chart below).