Veeam Azure Backup and Recovery Released

Most organizations today are leveraging the cloud in a major way. Many have migrated business-critical services such as email and file storage the the cloud and are using Infrastructure-as-a-Service to run mission critical servers in cloud service provider environments like Amazon AWS, Google GCP, and Microsoft Azure. Not matter where you run your applications and services, protecting your data is an absolutely critical aspect of business-continuity and disaster recovery.

Veeam has released major news on the front of protecting your cloud infrastructure running in Microsoft Azure with the release of Veeam Azure Backup and Recovery. In this post, we will take a look at Veeam Azure Backup and Recovery, an overview of the new backup solution, and how it can protect your workloads running in Azure.

Why are cloud backups necessary?

Just to level-set, why do you need to backup your data in cloud IaaS environments in the first place? Arent your VMs and other resources in some of the most powerful, well-protected, and resilient datacenters in the world?

They are. Most cloud service providers work on what they refer to as a shared responsibility model for guaranteeing your data is safe. This means that while the CSP is responsible for making sure the underlying infrastructure is resilient and if there is a failure in the hardware, they are responsible for making sure that doesn’t affect your workloads.

However, this does not mean that you can’t have data loss. Think about this. If you have a ransomware attack that affects data on a cloud server. Or, if you have an end user or IT admin who accidentally deletes massive amounts of data in your resources running in Azure, this is your responsibility.

From the cloud infrastructure perspective, your resources may be running perfectly fine. However, as you can see, massive data loss can potentially happen.

Veeam Azure Backup and Recovery Overview

First of all, let’s get an overview of what Veeam Azure Backup and Recovery is, how it works, and its features and benefits. The new Veeam Azure Backup and Recovery solution is readily available in the Azure marketplace. This means you can start backing up your resources in just minutes.

It uses policy-based automation to schedule snapshots of your Azure VMs for fast backups. Recovery is just as effective and quick. Full and file-level recovery are available using the new Veeam Azure Backup and Recovery solution. You can restore right back to Azure or to your own private cloud.

For long-term retention, you can backup to Azure blob storage for more cost-effective storage for archival use cases. It is also integrated with Veeam Backup & Replication to allow you to have full visibility and integration across your backup data management platform for a single-pane-of-glass view.

Veeam Azure Backup and Recovery Features and Benefits

As we have already alluded to, there are really great features and benefits to the new Veeam Azure Backup and Recovery solution. These include the following:

• Turnkey solution – The new Veeam Azure backup and recovery solution is readily available in the Azure marketplace. This means you have no infrastructure to stand up to start benefiting from the backup solution. You can literally be up and running in a few minutes.
• Intuitive – The solution is a simple, wizard-driven UI that allows intuitively picking the VMs you want to protect and starting to back them up.
• Standard file format – One of the great features of the solution is that Veeam has made the file format interoperable and portable to integrate right into Veeam Backup & Replication. Managing your data across both on-premises and the Azure public cloud is seamless.

Azure specific benefits and features:

• Agentless backups – There is nothing worse than having to manage agents to perform backups. With Veeam Azure Backup and Recovery, there are no agents. It is Azure-native, meaning Veeam is making use of Azure native snapshots to perform the data protection of your VMs running in Azure. This means both backups and restores of your data will be extremely quick.
• Backup and retention policies – Using backup and retention policies you can automate the Azure VM snapshots taken for data protection purposes.
• Full and file-level recovery – You can perform a full VM restore or a file-level restore depending on the type of recovery you need to perform
• Built-in cost calculator – Veeam has provided a built-in cost calculator to estimate the costs of the solution in the environment so there are no surprises with your data protection
• Blob storage – Veeam Azure Backup and Recovery provides great archival and long-term storage options that are cost-effective by allowing you to target Azure blob storage for storing your data
• Support Security and 3-2-1 Backup methodology – Veeam Azure backup and recovery allows you to make use of corss-subscription and cross-region configurations for allowing you to use multiple Azure subscriptions/locations to help further diversify your data
• Multifactor authentication – Veeam Azure Backup and recovery supports multi-factor authentication
• Portable file format – This allows you to make use of your backups both in your own private cloud as well as the public cloud
• Automatic protection for VMs recovered to Azure – Automatically protect your workloads migrated to Azure from on-premises or other clouds.

Veeam Azure Backup and Recovery licensing

We have touched on cost just briefly. What does the Veeam Azure Backup and recovery solution cost? Veeam is offering what they call flexible licensing options. This includes the following:

• Free edition – You can backup up to 10 VMs with unlimited restores in Azure for free
• BYOL edition (standalone) – You can protect standalone VMs for $40 per Azure VM per year
• BYOL edition (integrated) – You can utilize your Veeam universal license to do what Veeam refers to as bring your own license to the Veeam Azure backup and recovery solution

Wrapping Up and Impressions

The new Veeam Azure Backup and Recovery solution will be a game changer for protecting your workloads in Microsoft Azure IaaS environments. Especially for existing Veeam customers, the solution will easily integrate to your Veeam infrastructure that you already have in place on-premises with Veeam Backup & Replication.

The native, agentless solution that can be deployed in minutes from the Azure marketplace will allow you to quickly and easily protect your Azure VM workloads running in the Azure cloud seamlessly and easily. It is also great to see that Veeam has extended its free 10 VM pricing model to the Azure cloud as well. This means you can either try the solution out for free or literally use it for free for up to 10 workloads. Very cool!

Check out the free Veeam Azure Backup and Recovery solution here.