Veeam Software has kicked off its annual VeeamON customer and partner conference in San Diego, California, with a flurry of technical and channel announcements, which we will bring you over the next couple of days.
In the busy market space of SaaS backup, Veeam announced the launch of Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft Entra ID. With Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) facing many millions attacks daily, protecting organisations’ digital identities has never been more critical, said Veeam.
Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft Entra ID is designed to simplify data resilience for Entra ID tenants, ensuring organisations can protect their essential assets. Support for Entra ID is the latest extension of Veeam Data Cloud.
“Security starts with managing your users and ensuring the right people have access to the right systems. That’s why protecting Entra ID is so important, and why it’s the latest addition to our Veeam Data Cloud platform,” said Niraj Tolia, chief technology officer at Veeam. “We are giving customers greater simplicity with an enterprise-ready, pre-hardened, and self-configured SaaS solution that removes the burden of managing and maintaining complex backup infrastructure.”
Protecting Entra ID includes not only addressing cybersecurity threats, but also managing compliance requirements, recycle bin limits, accidental deletions, and policy misconfigurations, and that’s what the update promises to do.
Veeam has also unveiled a vendor agnostic Data Resilience Maturity Model (DRMM). The new framework aims to empower organisations to objectively assess their true resilience posture, and take “decisive, strategic action” to close the gap between “perception and reality”, said Veeam.
The framework offered comes after Joint research conducted by Veeam and consulting firm McKinsey, among 500 execs, which revealed a “staggering disconnect”. While 30% of CIOs believed their organisations are “above average” in data resilience, fewer than 10% actually were, according to the research.
“Data resilience is critical to survival, and most companies are operating in the dark,” said Anand Eswaran, CEO of Veeam. “The new Veeam DRMM is more than just a model, it’s a wake-up call that equips leaders with the tools and insights necessary to transform wishful thinking into actionable, radical resilience, enabling them to start protecting their data with the same urgency as they protect their revenue, employees, customers, and brand.”
The Veeam DRMM framework aims to empower leaders to assess and improve their data resilience by providing valuable insights for aligning people, processes, and technical capabilities with their overall data strategy. This alignment helps minimise risk exposure while allowing organisations to concentrate on mission-critical objectives.
“Data resilience isn’t just about protecting data, it’s about protecting the entire business,” Eswaran added. “This is the difference between shutting down operations during an outage or keeping the business running. It’s the difference between paying a ransom or not. It provides the foundation for AI innovation, compliance, trust, and long-term performance, including competitive advantage.”
Speaking of AI, VeeamON is expected put more flesh on the bones as to how Veeam partners, including MSPs, can take advantage of AI service opportunities, and use AI to better protect their end customers.
According to various market research, Veeam and Cohesity are neck and neck leaders in the data backup and recovery market by market share, after Cohesity completed its acquisition of Veritas at the end of last year. And in the AI tech and preparedness framework spaces this morning, Cohesity fired its own salvo in the continuing race.
Cohesity unveiled RecoveryAgent, a new AI-powered cyber orchestration solution for Cohesity NetBackup and DataProtect customers. RecoveryAgent automates cyber recovery preparation, testing, compliance, and response, enabling customers to recover from cyber incidents faster, it is promised. It offers intelligent, customisable recovery “blueprints”, and enables “rigorous” testing of recovery processes in a non-production environment, giving customers “more confidence” in their ability to respond to proliferating cyber attacks.
With these blueprints, the aim is that firms will be better prepared for cyber incidents before they happen. RecoveryAgent’s “intuitive” UI (user interface) allows teams to “easily” build recovery plans with scripted workflows that automatically integrate critical steps for incident response, such as threat hunting, malware scanning, and instant data restores.
Users can rehearse recoveries to “prove” the blueprint will effectively recover their data in a non-production environment without impacting production applications. “This frequent testing helps ensure readiness for real-world incidents,” said Cohesity.
More to follow from VeeamON in San Diego...
