Veeam Software wants to expand its purview, scope and mandate. We have been asked to move on from thinking about Veaam as a data backup and recovery platform specialist; the company now self-styles itself as a “data resilience” company – perhaps somehow alluding to its vision of broader and more robust information defense systems that can cope with the complexity of modern data topographies.  

Actually, for Veeam, it’s all about good systems integration.

The company says it has shown evidence of its capabilities to provide backup, recovery and cybersecurity (yes, plain and simple) across an increasing number of heavyweight cloud platforms, databases and service layers.

As such, the snappily named Veeam Data Platform v12.2 has broadened its support for protecting data on more platforms.

Why does that matter?

Because commercial and public enterprise technology departments typically have their own preferred information infrastructure, so Veeam doesn’t want to have to say to any prospective customer that you “have to use data service of cloud layer x, y or z if you want to get Veeam support”… hence the additional broadening happening now.

Nutanix, Proxmox VE, MongoDB

Specifically, Veeam has created a new integration with Nutanix Prism Central (a software appliance technology used to configure, monitor and manage virtualized computing environment clusters with machine learning accelerators) to provide what it calls best-in-class protection. Additionally, there is new Proxmox VE hypervisor support (an open source server virtualization platform based on Debian GNU/Linux with a built-in web interface) to allow organizations to migrate and modernize on their own terms. For document-based database converts, MongoDB backup is also included to offer immutability, centralized management and recovery.

Keen to champion the integration and compatibility message, Veeam says that Data Platform v12.2 offers the ability to migrate and secure data across new platforms. 

Three Core Data Freedoms

“In a digital world, organizations face three critical challenges: they must protect their data and be able to recover it no matter what happens rapidly; they need the freedom to move to new platforms; and their data must be available where it’s needed, including AI,” said Anand Eswaran, CEO at Veeam. 

Eswaran states that Veeam Data Platform v12.2 helps accelerate organizations’ transformation to the cloud, into new hypervisor use cases or deeper into Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) services with support for Amazon FSx, (a file storage infrastructure service), the petabyte-scale Amazon RedShift cloud data warehouse, Azure Cosmos DB (a serverless vector database that claims to be able to handle any data) and Azure Data Lake Storage. 

The  Futurum Viewpoint

“The Futurum Group’s Cybersecurity Decision Maker IQ data indicates that improving the ability to meet RPO/RTO requirements and the ability to improve cyber resiliency capabilities, are the top reasons that customers would consider replacing their existing data protection vendor,” said Krista Case, research director at The Futurum Group. 

Case further notes that IT and Security teams express the need not only for confidence in the ability to recover as quickly as possible from a cyberattack but also to optimize their security posture and defenses, to prevent an attack. 

“At the same time, we are seeing customers evaluate a vast array of hypervisor and cloud infrastructure options to optimize cost and functionalities – making data mobility more important than ever. Veeam Data Platform v12.2 is pinpointing this requirement while continuing the company’s steady cadence of data resiliency-focused updates,” she said.

YARA, Yada, Yada

The Veeam platform offers full management of YARA rules. Standing for Yet Another Recursive Acronym, YARA is an open-sourced resource that enables cybersecurity teams to identify and classify malware like ransomware. The new release from Veeam also includes secure distribution and orchestrated scanning of backups with expanded health-check alarms to help identify data integrity violations and collection gaps. Additionally, backups can be fast-tracked to archive storage, optimizing costs without compromising compliance.

The technologies on show here gravitate around backup and recovery offered with freedom of infrastructure choice, simpler (or at least amalgamated and unified) management console controls for systems administrators and data engineers, plus a range of subset functions to enable migration and scale-related data tasks to happen. Veeam wants to be the data resilience dream, let’s track the trajectory of this beam.