Around a year ago, Veeam became a Platinum Microsoft 365 Backup Storage partner. Nobody else has joined us since. This status was something earned, not given. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how Veeam was able to achieve this recognition and how it relates to the speed and scale of your data recovery times in Microsoft 365.
What Platinum actually took
Microsoft 365 Backup Storage is a storage plane that lives inside the Microsoft security boundary. Because backup and recovery happen inside the Microsoft 365 tenant, the API can overcome throttling challenges commonly found in other APIs leveraged by backup solutions. This allows very fast bulk backup and recovery speeds.
Veeam was one of the first vendors to build on top of the Microsoft API, and we’ve stayed at the front of the queue since. We were also the first to bring Microsoft 365 Backup Storage to Government Community Cloud (GCC). Veeam’s strong focus on Microsoft 365 data resilience and deep engineering expertise has made us stand out from the crowd as a notable Microsoft 365 Backup Storage partner. On the business side, our five-year strategic agreement with Microsoft means we co-sell, co-plan, and co-invest rather than integrate once and move on.
Platinum is what that combination earns. One year on, no other vendor has matched it.
The gap most backup vendors haven’t closed
Plenty of well-known backup solutions still don’t offer Microsoft 365 Backup Storage at all. Not as an option or add-on.
That leaves them working through the same standard, throttled paths everyone else uses. Fine for restoring a single mailbox. Painful when a ransomware event takes out thousands of OneDrive accounts and a few hundred SharePoint sites, and someone senior wants to know how long a full recovery will take. Without Microsoft 365 Backup Storage, the honest answer is often weeks. Many backup solutions will even claim their core solution is “good enough” or offers speeds as fast or faster than Microsoft 365 Backup Storage. This is simply not possible. There are backup limitations that exist that can only be overcome with Microsoft 365 Backup Storage.
About those speed claims
Here’s the part worth being blunt about. If a backup vendor claims they recover Microsoft 365 data faster than Microsoft 365 Backup Storage does, ask them to show you the math.
At disaster recovery volumes, throughput isn’t set by how clever a vendor’s software is. It’s set by the path the data travels. The standard Microsoft 365 APIs throttle, by design, and they throttle everyone equally. Microsoft 365 Backup Storage delivers median large scale restore performance of 2TB per hour*, either through Microsoft directly or through a Microsoft 365 Backup Storage partner. There is no third door. *Read more details on this performance page.
The Microsoft 365 Backup API is not subject to throttling, Microsoft’s documentation confirms this fact. While prioritized recovery can help, for situations where you need hundreds of sites or mailboxes restored at the same time, there is no substitute for Microsoft 365 Storage and the amplified recovery speeds it delivers.
Why we built Premium instead of picking a side
The easy path would have been to pick one model. Go all in on Microsoft 365 Backup Storage for raw speed, or stay entirely on Veeam’s own storage for control. Both trade something away.
Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 Premium doesn’t. It runs two completely isolated backup planes: A high-speed plane powered by Microsoft 365 Backup Storage inside the Microsoft security boundary, and an independent, off-site copy in a separately operated Veeam tenant. You get the speed and scale of Microsoft alongside the control and flexibility of Veeam, managed from one place.
That’s also the strictest reading of the 3-2-1-1-0 Rule you can apply to a SaaS workload. Separate copies, separate planes, separate operators, and verified recovery.
Finastra is one example of an organization that had to meet aggressive recovery expectations for over 9,000 Microsoft 365 users and nearly 750 TB of critical data. With Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 Premium, they gained the flexibility and scale needed to recover efficiently. Read the full story.
What that looks like in practice
For the people who run the restores, here’s what Premium puts on the table:
- Median speeds of 2TB per hour, with no application throttling. Initial backups and full restores that used to run for weeks finish in hours or days.
- Bulk restores at scale, including entire SharePoint sites and OneDrive accounts, so a large cyberattack doesn’t turn into a multi-week recovery project.
- Granular, item-level recovery across Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams, plus advanced search for eDiscovery, legal requests, and audits.
- Your choice of storage region, so you can optimize for performance or meet local data residency and compliance requirements.
- Security built on top of Microsoft 365 Backup Storage, including service-level immutability, multi-factor authentication, role-based access control, and IP range restriction.
- Entra ID protection included, because identity is part of the recovery plan, whether or not it’s in the backup plan.
The point of the pairing is that you stop choosing: Speed and scale when a bad day gets worse, control and flexibility for everything else.
Where we go from here
More than 26 million Microsoft 365 users are already protected by Veeam. Every one of them gains when the two companies behind this keep building it together.
Our own Mike Resseler, Sr. Director of Product Management, has led Veeam’s Microsoft 365 backup solutions since version 1 around a decade ago, and shares an optimistic view of the future.
“One year in as the only Platinum partner and we’re not treating it as a finish line,” Resseler said. “We will keep investing in what we build on top of Microsoft 365 Backup Storage. We want our level of commitment to be second to none, and there are many more exciting and truly valuable capabilities to come for our customers.”
Get started
If your Microsoft 365 recovery plan is currently measured in weeks, it’s worth an afternoon to see what ours looks like.
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