Veeam Cloud Connect – a customer perspective!

During the partner keynote at VeeamON it was announced that some of its’ partners will be ready to go in terms of supporting the new Veeam Cloud Connect hosting functionality that is set to be released inside of Veeam Backup and Replication v8.  In it’s basics, Veeam Cloud Connect and the Veeam Service Provider certification allows partners to become a service provider, allowing their customers to get their backups offsite and provide a full backup hosting environment.

So, in terms of a customer what does this mean?  Many small to medium size businesses use Veeam to take care of their day to day backups and as an added bonus replicate and test their backups to ensure consistency.  That said, the shear cost of acquiring space, compute, and storage at an offsite location tends to be a hurdle that is hard to overcome.  But it’s not just that – even if budget is not a problem, the complexity of providing and setting up connectivity, networking, and routing can be a challenge to those without a large IT staff.  Backing up to a VSP certified Veeam Cloud Connect partner eliminates those challenges, allowing customers to simply rent space from their preferred partner.

From within Veeam Backup and Replication backing up to a VSP through Cloud Connect is essentially no different than if you were backing up locally.  When we setup our backup repositories we currently select either a Windows or Linux machine with some available storage and then it is available to be used within our backup jobs.  Veeam Cloud Connect is much the same – A Veeam-powered service provider will simply show up as a backup repository within your Veeam Backup and Replication console and can be used within your jobs just as any other repository.  Easy!

But it’s more than that!

Sure, Veeam Cloud Connect will allow us to easily get our backups offsite without incurring most of the major capital costs that come along with that, but it offers much more – more that centers around trust.  Mostly everyone is aware of giant cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, and VMware – and the services they provide are bar none amazing but do we really trust them with our data.  The thing about granting partners with the ability to become a Veeam hosting provider brings the trust issue closer to home for the customer!  Partners are in the trenches everyday, building relationships with customers and ensuring that these are life-long commitments.  In my opinion, people tend to trust someone they have worked with often, someone they met many times over the years, and someone who is local – essentially their preferred IT partners and VARs.  By allowing their partners to become hosting providers Veeam has essentially leveraged this trust that partners have worked to obtain with their customers, and in turn, allowed the partners to provide a well rounded, complete solution to these customers.  It’s really a win-win all around.

I think about markets like education, healthcare, government – these verticals house very important and sensitive data, data that needs to be protected both onsite and off.  With that said, strict compliance guidelines usually dictate exactly how and where this data may sit.  Honestly, if that place is outside of the US the major players just aren’t there.  I can see how Veeam Cloud Connect can solve this issue.  By utilizing a preferred partner, educational institutions and districts could essentially leverage a partner who is “close to home” to provide them with that offsite repository for their data.  Someone they already know and trust.

Furthermore, why settle at just one?  There are many school districts in Ontario who may or may not leverage Veeam as a backup vendor of choice – but for those that do I can see tremendous opportunity for partners to design and implement data-centers centered directly around the compliance and regulations that the districts face.  Again, a win win – a partner gets many like customers and the customers get an easy and secure solution – without the need to purchase additional hardware or licensing.

In essence, Veeam Cloud Connect is more than just a backup repository for a customer.  It’s an opportunity.  An opportunity for partners to leverage the trust they have built, an opportunity for customers, especially those in similar to verticals to unite and look for a “groupon” type deal for offsite backups.  And an opportunity for everyone to ensure that in the event of a disaster, they are not left without the critical data that their business needs to survive!