afi.ai vs. Veeam Backup for Azure

1. Data backup for Exchange Online, SharePoint and Teams works very well and reliable. 2. MS Teams support is good, which includes Private channels. 3. Excellent security options ( ransomware detection, encryption keys hosted by us) 4. Self service for end users is a huge time saver for our helpdesk team 5. We kill two birds with one stone with user archiving, compliance and cost savings on MS licenses.

For our purposes I can't particularly find any shortcomings of Veeam Backup for Azure. It has been working well for our needs for a few years now. Maybe for someone with a larger cloud footprint or more complex needs, or maybe someone who wants to be able to deploy and configure the appliance using infrastructure as code it may not be as practical.

Incentivized

• Archiving of deleted Microsoft 365 users.
• Backup of SharePoint lists and OneNote books.
• Fast offline export of a mailbox and SharePoint items.

• Reduce storage costs and minimizing the impact on network consuption.
• Veaam Backup for Azure provides application-aware backups for Microsoft SQL Server, ensuring that our data is backed up and available for recovery correctly.
• Replication: Veeam Backup for Azure helps us to replicate our workloads to another Azure region or on-premises environment for disaster recovery purposes and compliance needs.

Incentivized

• Reporting API could be improved
• Data center in the UK to be post-Brexit proof would be good (which, as I understand, is planned)

• Documentation around service account permissions was a little sparse when we implemented it
• It's sometimes hard to get the reason behind a (rare) job failure without going into logs
• The UI around snapshots and backups could do with some clarity around the restore points that will be available

Incentivized

We will continue to renew the service for as long as we continue to use MS 365, unless Microsoft will release native Office 365 backup that provides all necessary features, including multi-geo admin roles, long-term affordable archiving storage tier, auto-conversion of email formats (MBOX, EML etc), point-in-time preview of previous file versions.

Plainly, the product just works. I don't have to babysit it.

Incentivized

The UI is very intuitive and requires almost zero training to use. Our end users were able to use it with after just reading a simple one-pager.

It was so easy that you thought it wasn't working. Once you saw data and was able to recover it or do a restore with the product those beliefs in the system went to the roof. Once you get a product that does everything you want it to do, you will give it it's props.

Incentivized

Support is very technical and always eager to help us. The support team's responses are mostly relevant, with no generic/automated answers that would waste our time. The company's online product documentation is very clear and to the point; it answers most of the user questions in a detailed and clear manner.

Great support team!

Incentivized

We used Backupify before, and decided to move as the system overall became very unreliable (lost data, inaccessible UI, sluggish, etc.).

Backup Exec was a very clunky application and took forever to backup to and restore from. We would backup to SSD external hard drives from a flash array, but the process still took forever to finish. Sending our data to the Azure blob storage via Veeam is a faster and more secure process than saving to the external hard drives with Backup Exec.

Incentivized

• We have used afi.ai to recover data 3 times since we signed up. The cost of potentially lost data was $1k+.

• We have had fast recovery of documents when needed; sub 10 minutes from start of restore to complete and in the users hands
• Easily a value add for backing up files outside of the given Microsoft retention period; piece of mind
• Easy tool to use with minimal training required to use it and set up backups
• When you do change your cloud licensing it does require manual intervention to update backup data requirements. if the business makes changes then your backup person may not know to make these changes

Incentivized