Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v6 adds more control over critical data

Veeam Software has announced the latest version of its fastest-growing Software as a Service (SaaS) product, Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v6.

The backup and recovery solution for Microsoft 365 enables users to back up to any location, including on-premises, in a hyperscale cloud, or with a service provider. The company says new features in v6 increase time savings for IT departments due to a diminished burden for recovery requests and additional cost savings.

"Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 reported 73% growth YoY, with 8.5 million users relying on Veeam to protect their Microsoft 365 data, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams," says Veeam CTO and SVP of Product Strategy, Danny Allan.

"Within all SaaS platforms, including Microsoft 365, the organisation owns and controls their data, and it's the organisation's responsibility to protect it. The growth and momentum of Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 is an indication that more organisations realise the importance of managing and securing their data, and consistently trust Veeam with critical business assets."

He says 50% of backup and SaaS admins list accidental deletions as their top motivator for protecting Microsoft 365, citing the time spent restoring user data as a pain point due to frequent accidental deletions.

Veeam's latest SaaS release introduces the self-service restore portal for Microsoft 365 environments, allowing IT administrators to delegate restores of emails files from a centralised location securely. The company says restore scenarios, like simple user accidental deletions, will not require an IT admin's assistance and can be done independently by users or delegated to a group of restore operators without the need to provide direct access to the backup server.

"Microsoft 365 data is being generated at a rapid rate, with over 300 million commercial paid seats, and organisations are holding onto more data as retention policies evolve," says Allan.

"This has created a need for organisations to leverage low-cost object storage as they retain growing electronic intellectual properties. To meet this demand, Veeam has added backup copy to Amazon S3 Glacier, Glacier Deep Archive and Azure Archive for a secondary copy on low-cost, long-term object storage with options for various retention periods.

"This enhancement of cloud object storage integrations is in addition to AWS S3, Azure Blob, IBM Cloud, Wasabi and other S3-compatible providers already included in previous releases."

The latest version of Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 includes:  

• Automation and scalability for enterprise organisations and service providers.   
• Time savings in handling restores and not building and maintaining your own portal.  
• Enhanced security with multifactor authentication (MFA) access to restore data.
• Recovery confidence with a secondary copy of data in low-cost object storage.

"Organisations are adopting a SaaS-first strategy, and with high usage and demand, the business-critical data in these environments is growing rapidly," says IDC Europe associate research director, Cloud Data Management, Archana Venkatraman.
 
"This requires organisations to ensure their backup strategies extend to these new environments to protect, govern and manage SaaS data. Veeam is continuously evolving to meet customers' modern data protection needs."

She says the features in v6, such as the self-service restore portal and cloud backup copy options for long-term retention, can further boost customers' data resilience and mitigate their SaaS data risks.