Earlier in the year I gave an overview on the Self Service recovery capability of Veeam Backup for Office 365 which gave Veeam Cloud and Service Providers the ability to offer self service to their tenants for the recovery of Exchange data that’s been backed up on their platforms as a service.
As a bit of a refresher:
Tenant admins communicate with the Service Provider via the Cloud Gateway component which handles flow of data. The Service Provider grants the ability to their tenants so that each tenant can perform self restore operations using Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange. By default, tenants are not able to restore anything from the backup without a Service Provider assistance.
The steps above show the self restore scenarios performed by the Tenant:
- Tenants use Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange to send restore requests via Veeam Cloud Gateway directly to the Service Provider.
- On the Service Provider side, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 management server detects a proxy server responsible for processing tenant data.
- Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 management server locates an associated repository that contains a backup file that belongs to the Tenant.
- Corresponding backup data is then transferred back to the tenant via Veeam Cloud Gateway.
What’s Changed in v2.0:
As mentioned, one of the big limitations in VBO v1.5 was the fact you could only restore the most recently backed up recovery point which limited it’s usefulness for most administrators looking to take advantage of the feature. That’s changed in VBO v2.0 with the ability to now choose a point in time from the Explorers. This is true for both Veeam Explorer for Exchange and Sharepoint (Which also does OneDrive).
Shown below is a Service Provider view of a restore operation for the Sliema organisation. As with the previous versions you have the ability to use latest or go back to a point in time.
As a reminder…the retention is set against the Backup Repository in VBO. Organisations are assigned to Repositories which dictates their own retention.
At the tenant end, once the Veeam Explorer has been launched and the Connect to a Service Provider option has been chosen, you now see similar options to either do the latest, or go to a point in time.
If you go to choose a point in time that precedes the date of the first backup you will get the error below.
Once a correct point in time has been selected the Self Service can begin. Shown below i’m able to go back to the 3rd of May 2018 restore point and perform actions on mail items.
In this case, I was looking for a AWS Bill that I had deleted out of the mailbox and had gone way past my default Exchange retention settings.
Back on the Service Provider end, you can see the active restore job session which is being facilitated through Cloud Connect.
Conclusion:
To reiterate, the market for Office365 backups is significant and we have built in some pretty cool technology into Backup & Replication that works with Backup for Office365 that allows easy, self service capabilities that can be productized by Service Providers out of the box. Not only can Service Providers offer services to backup client Exchange, SharePoint or OneDrive Organisations but they can also extend that to offer self service which increases overall operational efficiencies at the provider end while also offering enhanced services to clients.
References:
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbo365/guide/vex_sp_add.html?ver=20#pit
Configuring Service Provider Self Service Recovery with Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365
