On Friday, 11 August, I had the opportunity to attend the VeeamOn Forum at the Hilton on Princes Wharf in Auckland. This event, which was the first of its kind in Auckland, was attended by over 200 people from all walks of life. I spoke to representatives of district councils, museums, as well as existing customers, partners and employees of Veeam.
Lucidity is just starting out on our Veeam partnership journey so it was great to hear about other similar businesses that have already gone before us and begun successful partnerships with one of the leaders in the backup and recovery solutions sector (ref. press release).
As we all know, there are many reasons to ensure backup and disaster recovery are the hot topics in the IT industry currently. Data is now the world’s most valuable resource and protecting it is understandably big business (ref. The Economist). Veeam is here to make designing a business continuity strategy more straightforward, and the execution of that strategy fast and pain free.
One speaker at the event discussed how before Veeam it would take him an afternoon to recover a single file from their previous backup solution, and that is if it even worked at all. The backup window had previously been 14 hours and that has now been reduced to one hour. With Veeam, a single file takes only 5 minutes to restore, and his business can actually now restore an entire virtual machine in under 20 minutes. This has resulted in a significant reduction in risk for that particular business and they are now reaping the rewards; running a more efficient, streamlined operation that is delivering a far better user experience to its 400+ users.
One of the new features of the latest Veeam release that was heavily featured was backup for Office 365. A common misconception of cloud suites like Office 365 or G Suite is that because they are highly available (e.g. 99.9% uptime) that your data that is stored in the cloud suites is also backed up. This is not necessarily the case and Veeam is now providing a service that fills this gap. With nearly all businesses now running a significant portion of their business through email, being able to confidently say that your email is not only highly available, but also backed up the cloud, is a vital step in risk management.
Let’s say for instance an Office 365 user clicks on an email that contains malware, such as WannaCry. The email has somehow managed to get through all of the various levels of protection Microsoft offer as part of the Office 365 security suite, and the user unknowingly clicks on it and gets locked out of their email. Veeam’s Backup for Microsoft Office 365 console will allow you to restore that mailbox to a point in time before the user clicked on that email, allowing you to not only neutralise the threat, but also get your user back up and working exceedingly quickly.
With more devices connected now than ever before and that number increasing dramatically every year (50 billion devices are projected to be connected by 2020), digital transformation truly is the new normal and businesses need to plan accordingly. A digital transformation strategy should be in place now for businesses of every size, and backup and disaster recovery should one of the main points of focus for this strategy.
New Zealand has had its fair share of natural disasters over the past decade; these in conjunction with the rise in cyberattacks highlight an increasing risk to businesses data that should be taken very seriously. When Cyclone Debbie hit Australia in March 2017 an estimated $1.4 billion of business was lost and over 1,000 business interruption claims were lodged, many of which could have been avoided if the proper business continuity plan had been in place. Businesses now need to be Always On; extended downtime can cost businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars very quickly.
The VeeamOn forum was extremely insightful; I met a lot of interesting people, the content was very timely and informative and the Veeam swag was on point (free water bottle, fidget spinners, stress balls, coffee cups etc.). However, the highlight for me was the guest keynote speaker Jamie Fitzgerald from Inspiring Performance. You may know him as one of the stars of First Crossings or as that mad bloke that rowed across the Atlantic or walked across Antarctica; he is also an excellent motivational speaker and it was great to hear the tales and see some videos of his various experiences. The main takeaway for me was the importance in planning, and retaining the faith to overcome any obstacles that will undoubtedly crop up, to achieve your objectives.
If you are interested in hearing how you can plan to overcome any obstacles that may pop up in your business, contact Lucidity to discuss how a Veeam Always-On solution could work for you.
Lucy
