Yesterday we announced the GA Veeam Backup for Azure (Build 1.0.0.253). Available through the Azure Marketplace the product can be deployed within five minutes and be ready to backup Azure VM instances. Exactly like its AWS sister product, this release contains a FREE edition which will backup up to 10 Azure instances out of the box and is fully featured. In addition to a super responsive UI and the ease of use the extended API capabilities will be a winner with more seasoned Azure users. As much as there is irony in that fact, it is true that a good UI isn’t generally what attracts use in Azure.

Apart from being free there are a number of capabilities in this initial release which are help to improve the experience and outcome of backing up workloads in Azure and will prove valuable for customers looking to get more value and features out of their Azure backups. To be successful, there needs to be more value that what is offered in the native Azure backup offering… while native solutions are often useful, they are also often limited… something Veeam Backup for Azure is not.

  • Deploy directly from Azure Marketplace.
  • Backup to Azure Blob storage for longterm retention.
  • Policy based control over what and how Azure VMs are protected.
  • Security built around Microsoft Azure service accounts and Active Directory integration.
  • Cost calculator to estimate your monthly costs before launching a policy
  • Restore the virtual machine to the original location or different location with potential different settings
  • Restore a disk to the original location or different location with potential different settings
  • New Public API with Swagger UI
  • Integration with Backup & Replication External Repository capabilities to enable full portability of workloads

The Veeam Product Strategy Team has already produced a few blog posts and videos around the release which goes into some greater details around the core components and features of Backup for Azure.

As we look to quickly iterate on this initial v1 release we will look to support even more Azure services but for now, this is an other significant moment in Veeam’s history as we look to broaden our own in-house capabilities and extend the Veeam Backup Platform to cover even more workloads and make them portable as they land in our repositories and in our portable data format.

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