Veeam Backup: 5 Key Solutions, Features and Capabilities

What Is Veeam Backup?

Veeam Backup is a data protection and backup solution developed by Veeam Software, a company specializing in backup, recovery, and data management products for virtual, physical, and cloud environments. Veeam provides dedicated backup solutions for Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Kubernetes, and popular cloud platforms.

In this article:

• Veeam Backup Solutions
  • Backup and Replication
  • Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365
  • Veeam Backup for Salesforce
  • Kubernetes Backup
  • Veeam Backup for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud
• What Is Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager?

5 Veeam Backup Solutions

Here are the primary backup solutions provided by Veeam Software:

1. Backup and Replication

Veeam Backup and Replication provides a range of features designed to ensure data availability, including:

• Backup: It creates image-level backups of virtual, physical, and cloud-based workloads, capturing all the data in a consistent state, which can be used for fast recovery.
• Replication: Veeam Backup & Replication enables users to create and maintain replicas of critical VMs, providing a quick failover option in case of disaster or other disruptions.
• Recovery: Veeam offers various recovery options, such as full VM recovery, instant VM recovery, file-level recovery, and application-item recovery, allowing users to choose the most suitable option based on their needs and the specific disaster scenario.
• Backup copies: This feature enables users to create and store multiple copies of backups in different locations, enhancing data protection and ensuring compliance with data retention policies.

2. Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365

Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 is a data protection solution specifically designed to secure cloud-based data in Microsoft 365 applications, such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams. It enables organizations to back up their Microsoft 365 data to on-premises or cloud-based storage, ensuring data availability and compliance with regulatory and corporate data retention requirements.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 offers granular recovery options, allowing users to restore individual items, files, or entire sites as needed. By using this solution, businesses can safeguard their cloud data against accidental deletions, security threats, and retention policy gaps while maintaining control over their backups.

3. Veeam Backup for Salesforce

Veeam Backup for Salesforce is a data protection solution specifically designed to secure data within Salesforce, one of the world’s leading customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. This solution offers several advantages, including:

• Full control: It allows businesses to maintain control over their Salesforce data by backing it up to on-premises or cloud-based storage, ensuring data availability and compliance with regulatory and corporate data retention requirements.
• Flexible recovery: Veeam Backup for Salesforce provides granular recovery options, enabling users to restore individual records, files, or entire objects as needed, minimizing downtime and data loss in case of a disaster.
• Custom-built backup solution: Veeam’s solution is tailor-made for Salesforce, ensuring seamless integration and optimized performance. It simplifies the backup process, automates scheduled backups, and offers advanced features like metadata tracking and change detection for comprehensive protection.

4. Kubernetes Backup

Veeam Kubernetes Backup and Disaster Recovery is a comprehensive data protection solution designed specifically for Kubernetes, a widely adopted container orchestration platform. This solution offers several key features, including:

• Full protection of applications: Safeguards not only the data within Kubernetes clusters but also the underlying infrastructure, including persistent volumes, configurations, and metadata. This holistic approach ensures complete application protection and fast recovery in the event of a disaster.
• Policy-driven monitoring and automation: Enables users to define backup policies and automate monitoring, ensuring consistent data protection across all Kubernetes workloads. This reduces manual intervention, minimizes human error, and streamlines the backup process for greater efficiency.
• App-specific defenses: Veeam provides granular recovery options and application-specific defenses, allowing users to restore individual components or entire applications as needed. This flexibility enables businesses to minimize downtime and data loss, ensuring the continuity of their operations.

5. Veeam Backup for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud

Veeam offers data protection solutions designed specifically for each respective cloud platform. These solutions provide organizations with the tools needed to protect and recover their cloud-based workloads, ensuring data availability and compliance with regulatory and corporate data retention requirements.

Key features of these solutions include:

• API-first approach: Veeam’s cloud backup solutions integrate seamlessly with the native APIs of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, simplifying deployment and management while ensuring optimal performance.
• File-level restoration: These solutions offer granular recovery options, including file-level restoration, allowing users to recover individual files, folders, or entire virtual machines as needed.
• Secure access and isolated backups: Veeam ensures secure access to backups and stores them separately from the production environment, reducing the risk of unauthorized access or data corruption.
• AES encryption: Data is protected with industry-standard AES encryption during transfer and at rest, safeguarding sensitive information from potential breaches.
• Policy-driven detection and backup lifecycle optimization: Veeam automates backup scheduling and management based on user-defined policies, streamlining the backup process and optimizing the lifecycle of backup data.
• Wizard-guided recovery: Veeam’s intuitive recovery wizard simplifies the restoration process, guiding users through each step and ensuring a fast and efficient recovery.
• Immutability: Veeam supports immutable backups, which prevent data from being modified or deleted, ensuring data integrity and protection against ransomware attacks.

Related content: Read our guide to Veeam endpoint backup (coming soon)

What Is Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager?

Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager is a centralized management console designed to simplify and streamline the administration of multiple Veeam Backup & Replication installations. It is particularly useful for optimizing Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO) performance and building custom distributed infrastructure for backups across various locations and environments.

Key capabilities of Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager include:

• Cross-server backup job management: Administrators can manage and monitor backup jobs across multiple Veeam Backup servers from a single console. Veeam enables them to create, modify, and delete backup jobs, as well as start, stop, and retry jobs as needed.

• Data reports: Enterprise Manager generates detailed reports on backup infrastructure performance, job status, and capacity utilization, helping administrators to identify trends, optimize resource usage, and make informed decisions.
• Backup search: Administrators can quickly locate and identify specific backups, VMs, or physical machines using the integrated search functionality, streamlining recovery and troubleshooting efforts.
• VM and physical recovery: Enterprise Manager simplifies the recovery process by providing a centralized interface for initiating file-level, VM-level, and physical machine recoveries. It enables administrators to perform recoveries for various environments from a single console, reducing complexity and time-to-resolution.
• Central license and compliance management: Administrators can manage Veeam product licenses across their entire backup infrastructure. Enterprise Manager simplifies license allocation, ensures compliance with licensing terms, and helps organizations avoid penalties due to non-compliance.
• RESTful API: The built-in RESTful API enables seamless integration with third-party applications and custom tools, allowing organizations to automate tasks and build custom workflows tailored to their specific needs.
• Multi-tenant support: Enterprise Manager can be configured to provide a multi-tenant experience, enabling Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and large organizations with multiple departments to manage their backup infrastructure with a single console while maintaining data isolation and security.

Related Article: Veeam v12 guide.

Protecting Veeam Backup Data with Cloudian

Backing up Veeam directly to Cloudian Object Storage simplifies your backup infrastructure, reduces costs, leverages the scalability and durability of object storage, and ensures your data is protected. This solution is secure and efficient for long-term data retention, disaster recovery, and compliance requirements.

Benefits include:

1. Seamless Integration with Veeam: Cloudian Object Storage is compatible with Veeam Backup & Replication, offering a validated configuration for seamless integration. By backing up directly to Cloudian, you leverage the integration capabilities between Veeam and Cloudian, benefiting from the features and functionalities provided by both solutions.
2. Compliance and Data Governance: Cloudian Object Storage provides features like Object Lock, WORM (Write Once Read Many), and audit logging, which are essential for compliance and data governance. By backing up directly to Cloudian, you can leverage these features to meet regulatory requirements, ensure data immutability, and maintain an audit trail for your backups.
3. Data Durability and Availability: Cloudian Object Storage offers built-in data protection mechanisms such as erasure coding and data replication. These features ensure high durability and availability of your backup data. By backing up directly to Cloudian, you leverage these data protection capabilities, safeguarding your backups against hardware failures and enhancing overall data resilience.
4. Offsite and Disaster Recovery: Cloudian Object Storage supports hybrid cloud and multi-cloud deployments, allowing you to create offsite backups in remote locations or public cloud providers. By backing up directly to Cloudian, you can easily implement offsite backup and disaster recovery strategies, ensuring that your data is protected in geographically distributed locations.
5. Simplified Architecture: Directly backing up Veeam to Cloudian simplifies your backup architecture. You eliminate the need for intermediary backup targets or appliances, reducing the complexity of your backup infrastructure. This streamlined approach minimizes points of failure and potential bottlenecks, enhancing overall backup performance and reliability.
6. Scalability: Cloudian Object Storage provides exceptional scalability, allowing you to expand storage capacity easily. As your backup data grows, you can add more nodes to the Cloudian cluster, seamlessly increasing storage capacity without disruption. This scalability ensures that your backup repository can accommodate large amounts of data over time.
7. Cost Savings: Cloudian Object Storage is known for its cost-effectiveness compared to traditional storage solutions. By backing up data directly from Veeam to Cloudian, you can eliminate the need for additional intermediate storage systems or costly primary storage arrays. This helps reduce storage costs and optimizes your backup infrastructure budget.

Learn more about Cloudian for Veeam Backup and Replication.