In the growing market of Microsoft Office 365, backup is more important than ever. At Veeam, we have been delivering feature after feature to help organizations gain full control over their Office 365 data, and in addition to control customers want options!
Some admins require storing their Office 365 backups on-premises, others prefer to use the public cloud, which is the ideal destination for Office 365 backups due to its lower costs, simpler deployment and unlimited scale. That is why today we are proud to introduce Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 version 4, providing a cloud-optimized deployment option for cloud-first companies and all businesses looking to leverage the power of the cloud. This new release adds several enhancements, which will help you take advantage of lower storage costs and unlimited scalability, while helping you achieving added security and faster backup performance.
Object Storage support
Starting from version 4, you will be able to leverage Object Storage to offload your Office 365 data. You can choose from different providers such as Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Blob, IBM Cloud or S3 compatible object storage providers or even on-premises object storage.
A backup repository will be extended with the specific object storage and backups will be off-loaded directly to object storage!
Once you configure a backup repository to offload data, it will consist of two parts:
- Local folder, which contains metadata (JET DB)
- Object storage, which contains the metadata and backups
When the backup job starts, the data first goes to the local cache, which is only stored in RAM memory, and afterwards is sent directly to the object storage. In the local cache we store the metadata to present the object directly via Veeam Explorer, but the content of the object itself (email body, attachment, appointment info, file contents…) is stored in the object storage.
Additionally, when you perform a restore via a Veeam Explorer you will get a notification if you are accessing data from Object Storage to warn you about potential costs. Below you can see how it looks for the Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange when you open a restore point.
Enhanced security with encryption
Together with Object Storage support, we’ve also added the possibility to encrypt your Office 365 backups stored in Object Storage. This can be done by enabling encryption in the initial setup of the Object Storage repository. Having encryption built-in directly into the product addresses many common challenges it normally brings.
For the password management, we are adding a password manager. The passwords are used to protect the actual encryption key, which is stored in the backup file. This key is generated each time a backup job runs.
With all the Object Storage providers available, version 4 also introduces a cloud credential manager, in which we will list your accounts related to Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure Blob, IBM Cloud or S3 compatible storage providers.
Even faster backups!
When we introduced version 3 we made huge changes in terms of SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business backups. With version 4 we are taking it another step further.
Within Office 365 or Azure Active Directory you can create a non-mail-enabled security group, which contains a pool of backup accounts that will be used for the backup. Throttling within SharePoint Online is per account. Microsoft leverages this to assure uptime and Availability. As a result, it may impact backup speed. By using this new feature and leveraging multiple accounts it will increase backup speed and can reduce the risk of throttling.
Other enhancements
Besides improvements to backup speeds and object storage support, we have made even more changes.
One of these changes is the possibility to exclude contacts and calendars from the retention policy. The option to exclude these from the retention policy provides “forever” (as long as an associated mailbox is protected) backup of both contacts as calendar items. By enabling the new checkbox for contacts and calendars, all contacts and calendar items will be backed up and afterwards kept forever.
Another common request was to support non-mail-enabled security groups as a source for a backup job. This provides easier backup jobs configuration/automation. Within the backup job, it is now possible to select a security group as a source.
Finally, we’ve updated our Mailbox Protection report by adding additional information about:
- Group mailboxes
- Public mailboxes
- Shared mailboxes
Final note
Are you ready to leverage the reduced costs and unlimited scalability of object storage for your Office 365 backups? You can get started today by downloading a free trial for 30 days! We even offer a Community Edition FREE forever for up to 10 users and 1 TB of SharePoint data.