Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365

The fact that it backs up all things Microsoft 365 is the strongest feature of this product. Veeam can get its hooks into the complete M365 stack: Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams. It can back up the entire M365 ecosphere without issue. The intuitive interface is a second strong feature of this product. The M365 Veeam product uses the same interface as their traditional backup software, which reduced the amount of time our backup administrator needed to become familiar with the software. The UI has a simple layout that is easy to navigate, which helps to reduce administrator workload. Finally, this product performs well. We were concerned that the recovery time would be quite long since it is operating in the Microsoft cloud environment, but we have been pleasantly surprised by how quickly restores are completed.

It works well once it is set up. It is easy to restore items when you need to.

1. Straightforward Restore Workflows. When you are restoring files for an end user, you want to be able to do it quickly and with the confidence that you are restoring to the point in time that is needed. You don't want to have unecessary steps when working through a GUI, this is something Veeam excels at. 2. Reliability. The platform felt stable and predictable. Veeam has earned a reputation in the backup and recovery space and for good reason. 3. Hands-off Backup. Once the initial configuration and on-boarding is completed, backups run ongoing without further babysitting. You don't have to manage backup servers or storage, patching or scaling. It really did just work which was a huge win.

The primary weakness with this product is its pricing. This is a subscription-based product, which may result in higher costs for larger organizations. Although a very minor issue, Veeam does not integrate well with other third party tools. We have had this need surface twice now, and each time the third-party integration has either been too frustrating to implement, or not an option at all. Finally, this product could also provide better logging details on failed backup and restore jobs. While logging is available, the information in the logs is often vague and confusing as to the cause of the job failure. Often, the only course of action is to run the job again and hope that it completes without an erro.

It is sort of difficult to initially set up, especially when it comes to choosing only those SharePoint sites and Teams that you want to back up. The dashboard shows stats about objects that are not backed up. For example, it will show top 5 users who have the largest usage of OneDrive, but some of those users are not backed up intentionally, so the dashboard is shows stats that are not useful.

1. Limited Reporting and Visibility. This is an area that there could be improvements in. Dashboards would tell us that backups were running, but beyond that deeper analytics weren't particuarly visible. 2. Limited Customization. Since it's SaaS, we have limited control over scheduling granularity and advanced retention logic, which is part of the tradeoff when not hosting your own solution. 3. Cost Scaling. Pricing initially was predictable, but as our organization grew, user counts and retention requirements made cost a bigger consideration.