I’m back with a recap of the sessions I attended and my takeaways from Day 1 of virtual VeeamON! After the opening keynote, I made an iced coffee because we all know tech runs on caffeine, and began my journey through the worlds of cloud and ransomware.
The first thing I tuned in to was “Embrace the Breach with a Step-By-Step Cyber Recovery Plan” with Brad Linch and Michael Archick of Veeam’s Enterprise SE team. They told us that 75% of organizations get hit by cyberattacks. Additionally, according to the 2024 Ransomware Trends Report, 96% of attackers target backup software specifically. The important thing to understand about cyberattacks is that once an attacker is in your environment, they can find the tools they want to compromise quickly. Once they’re done with this information, they may even sell it to another group. This is why it’s important to have good data backups. Veeam’s Zero Trust Data Resiliency Architecture is built into its products for this reason. Brad and Michael then walked us through the ways that proper preparation can help prevent poor performance. In the event of an attack, an organization should already have a plan for conducting a Business Impact Assessment to prioritize what data to recover. Other preparation steps include implementing immutability, Four Eyes to require additional approvals, MFA, routine tests for backup cleanliness, and SIEM integration. The Incident Response Playbook is another important tool in the event of a ransomware attack. It walks through what to do before, during, and after restoring data. After an attack, organizations should run a postmortem and examine their backup and recovery solutions. If they’re using Veeam for backup, they should make sure they’re taking advantage of recovery solutions as well.
Continuing the backup theme, the next session was “Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365: What’s New?” with Edward Watson from Product Marketing and Polina Vasilyeva from Product Management. As this session started, Edward showed us Veeam’s timeline of continuous innovation for Microsoft 365 backup since 2016. The things that make this product different are that it provides infrastructure freedom, backup control, and recovery flexibility. He then talked about Veeam Backup for Microsoft v8’s newest features and how to optimize them. Watson told us that v8 has 3 pillars, all focused on security. Those pillars are zero-trust security, enterprise scale, and added support. While the product has had immutable backup copies in previous versions, v8 introduces more comprehensive and flexible immutability for Microsoft 365. Veeam will be one of few vendors who provides a multi-layered immutability strategy; and the ability to store backup data on any object storage makes it flexible. This session wrapped with a discussion on Veeam Proxy Pools which are built to enterprise scale. They’re meant to support the largest backups in additional to increasing performance and scaling up large environments efficiently. Polina showed off v8’s new features which you can view here VeeamON 2024 (cvent.com) at the 7:55 mark.
My day wrapped up with “VeeamON: All Things Hybrid/Multi-Cloud Architectures”. This Industry Insights featured Jason Buffington of Market Strategy and Leah Troscianecki of Product Marketing. They reviewed Veeam’s 2024 Data Protection Trends Report, sharing cyber resiliency and data protection trends, and what they mean for partners. While the 2023 report looked at IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS, the 2024 report focused on BaaS and DRaaS. Their research found that 88% of organizations are very likely to add BaaS and DRaaS to their servers. The report aims to get those organizations thinking about what clouds they’re protecting and how they’re protecting them. The session was casual, conversational, and wrapped with some words of wisdom from Leah and Jason. Leah reminded us that as the cloud grows and becomes more complex and expensive, organizations need to know how to make it work for them. She also talked about how organizations can work together to protect clouds because, “resiliency is a team sport”. Meanwhile Jason said he can’t think of many scenarios where you wouldn’t want to back up your cloud, reminded us to get data out of the building, and asks “Why BaaS when you can DRaaS?”.
When Leah said resiliency isn’t a team sport, she summarized the day for me. All day long, I’d been hearing about partnerships with other organizations and companies, with end users, and with customers. Every conversation reminded me that we need partners to thrive whether protecting our data, releasing new features, recovering from a ransomware attack, or scaling the business.
If you’re interested in watching these or any of the VeeamON sessions, they’re available to view on demand at VeeamON 2024. A few folks have asked me if the slides will be available for download. They will be available in the near future. We’ll be sure to let you know when they’re out.
