With the release of Veeam Backup & Replication v8 in 2014, Veeam redefined the way in which businesses of all shapes and sizes could extend their system and data Availability strategies to consume backup offerings from trusted service providers, with the launch of Veeam Cloud Connect Backup. Veeam Cloud Connect was made available for all Veeam customers who now had the ability to engage with a number of Veeam Cloud & Service Provider partners worldwide directly from their Backup & Replication console and configure offsite backup repositories to which virtual machines could be sent to over a secure internet connection, redefining the 3-2-1 rule of backups (three copies of data, on two types of media, one of which is off-site).

In “The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing,” Peter Mell and Timothy Grace point out that there are four types of clouds: Private, public, community, and a hybrid mix of at least two of these. If you are thinking “What is a community cloud?” then I encourage you to go back and read the NIST paper. It’s really short and succinct, and your personal cloud vocabulary will be better for it. The vast majority of business will end up using their own private clouds and interfacing with various public cloud offerings from their partners. Availability seems to fit just perfectly as a hybrid cloud opportunity.

Many CIOs are now adopting a cloud-first strategy and backing up and recovering critical data in the cloud is on the rise. As more and more companies explore the idea of migrating applications and data to the cloud, questions like “How secure are cloud services?” arise. While there isn’t a standout number one concern when it comes to cloud computing, the one thing we can be sure about is that security is front and center in CIO’s minds. Veeam has identified the top two concerns from our recent 2016 customer survey to be security and price.

One of the common things that happen in my group of evangelists is helping organizations of all sizes take an Availability strategy to the cloud. When it comes to the cloud, Veeam has a lot of options and has had so for a number of years.

I frequently go back to one question: “What are you wanting to accomplish with a cloud or service provider technology?” This is where the answers get interesting. I’ve heard everything from: “I’m out of space in my data center,” “I want cheap storage,” “I have a credit to use in Azure,” “I want complete disaster recovery,” “I want to get data off-site but don’t have a second site myself,” and more.

The Always-On Enterprise must ensure that its services comply with today’s new demands and challenges. Availability plays a central role here. In addition to common situations where a backup is needed (for example, when a user accidentally deletes data or a system cannot start after an update), more recent issues related to encryption-based Trojans also plague organizations today. While protecting backups against encryption-based Trojans was discussed earlier in this Veeam blog, many companies continue to look for solutions that deal, not only with backup protection, but also with disaster recovery (DR) scenarios.

Veeam Backup & Replication added support for VMware vCloud Director back in the v7 release. It was an immediate success for many service providers because they were finally able to properly protect native vCloud components like Organizations and vApps, instead of relying on operations happening at the underlying vSphere level where no information about vCloud constructs could be saved and restored.

At VeeamON 2015, we announced a new solution called Veeam Managed Backup Portal for Service Providers. The feedback we are receiving is overwhelming. In the meantime, we worked hard on releasing a technical preview. All of you who have worked with this preview and gave us feedback, thank you very much!

Today, we are happy to announce that Veeam Managed Backup Portal for Service Providers is generally available and ready for you in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace!

Starting with version 9, Veeam allows service providers to offer true Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to their customers for both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, thanks to Veeam Cloud Connect Replication — a fast, secure and cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) solution.

We have said it before and we’ll say it again: IT organizations around the globe are investing time and resources into public clouds, but there are still a lot of show-stoppers that make cloud-adoption less frequent than most people believe. Veeam has continued working on innovative solutions to bring added value to customers, including enabling service providers, and Veeam resellers that want to become service providers, with easy-to-use and affordable Veeam-powered backup services solutions.

If you have been following Veeam over the years, you know that we move at Veeam Speed! It is one of our core values and applies to the technologies in which we work with as well as the spirit of Veeam employees. One of the key and most strategic technologies from VMware is vCloud Air, and we are happy to announce that Veeam Backup & Replication is now listed in the vCloud Air Marketplace. Additionally, Veeam Backup & Replication is designated as VMware Ready for vCloud Air. Let’s explain what this is and what it means to Veeam partners.