Workload displacement and the need for awareness and control
This notion of digital displacement has accelerated with the move to remote working and work-from-home corporate directives. Data is being created on remote endpoint devices and on applications hosted on various systems which are in turn hosted on different platforms. As workloads shift from physical to virtual, from one platform to another, or from one cloud to another, it becomes increasingly challenging for Managed Cloud Service Providers to maintain visibility while offering management of those workloads.
On Premises and Infrastructure Backup Service offerings are core to creating recurring service revenue, and being able to have a complete awareness of all systems and services no matter what system they reside on across platform is critical. Beyond that, Cloud and Managed Service Providers need to be able to control access and visibility to those workloads as well as have the ability to report on them and ultimately bill their customers and resellers for their services.
Introducing Veeam Service Provider Console v5
To help solve these challenges, Veeam has built upon previous strong releases to introduce Veeam Service Provider Console v5 (Console v5). With the release of Console v5, we have expanded on its purpose-built capabilities to coincide with features and enhancements being released in V11. Adding full agent support and extending to the public cloud gives our service providers the ability to drive new service offerings.
All new features and enhancements work together to equip our cloud and service provider partners and their resellers to gain greater control and reporting of our Veeam backup agents no matter if they are managed directly from Console UI or Veeam Backup & Replication. There are stronger security options for log-in and password retrieval and Console v5 extends the power of automation with an enhanced RESTful API and new usability features such as allowing the remote patching of Veeam Backup & Replication servers under management.
Total management, control and reporting of agent endpoints
Reiterating the importance of endpoint protection and management, Veeam Service Provider Console v5 levels out the capabilities across all existing and new agent-supported operating systems. Full support of Veeam Agent for Linux brings it into line with Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows and there is out of the box supportability for the new Veeam Agent for Mac. This allows for centralized management of physical or virtual endpoints across those operating systems.
Like existing Windows Agent functionality, Console v5 will automatically discover Linux machines via discovery rules and will allow for remote deployment that will push and install Veeam Agent for Linux on remote computers. With Veeam Agent for Mac, there is a combined backup plus agent package that allows existing JAMF and MDM tools handle the deployments.
From here, managed cloud and service providers will be able to remotely manage jobs, be able to monitor and alert against SLAs and RPO policies, get detailed backup reporting, and most importantly, be able to gather license usage and bill customers and partners accordingly.
Increased security, enhanced reporting and automation
When offering an online portal of any kind, security is a key consideration, and in Console v5, we have added a very powerful “tick box option” regarding multi-factor authentication (MFA) which leverages TOTP-based (QR Code) authentication methods to allow service providers and their resellers the ability to turn this on either system wide or per company.
In terms of automation, the RESTful API v3 interface is now production ready and has been further enhanced since its initial preview release in Console v4. This now becomes the default API version for our service providers to use and includes even more actions and endpoints focused on Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) as well as detailed information for billing and backup reporting. Those service providers already using the existing v2 will now be able to migrate over to v3 before that becomes depreciated in future versions.
Console v5 adds extended per tenant reporting for data being stored as part of BaaS offerings. Service providers leveraging Insider Protection or Scale-out Backup Repositories backed with Capacity and Archive Tier Object Storage extents can get granular usage reporting through generated invoices in the UI or directly from the Restful API.
Expanding reach to public cloud workloads
Workloads moving from on-premises or partner hosted clouds into public clouds represents a challenge for cloud and service providers. These workloads still need to have backup services as part of a managed service offering. Console v5 leveraging the built-in public cloud plug-ins in Veeam Backup & Replication v11 extends the protection of workloads residing in AWS or Azure right from the Console UI.
Again, this is about awareness and control of these workloads and Console v5 offers the ability for cloud and service providers to offer monitoring and alerting, backup status reporting, license usage reporting and finally billing and invoicing for workload instances residing in AWS or Azure. This is critical in allowing managed service providers to continue generating revenue as public cloud usage continues to increase.
Conclusion
With these and 45+ total new features and enhancements, Veeam Service Provider Console v5 has become even more centralized for our cloud and service providers offering Backup as a Service based on Veeam technologies…
Check out the What’s New document, and head to the veeam.com download site to install or upgrade to Veeam Service Provider Console v5.