Item: Veeam Backup for Azure
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We wanted to standardize our backup platform across data centers, so we use it to backup our Azure virtual machines and we use Backup & Replication for our on-premises data centers. This way we are only using a single vendor for our backup solution across the environment, making licensing and management easier across the team.

Pros and Cons

Easy to setup
Easy to create backup jobs
Simple to restore virtual machines to Azure
Fantastic customer support

Ability to backup/restore SQL databases inside the guest virtual machines like you can with vMWare and Hyper-V
Integrated management inside the Veeam Backup & Replication console and doing away with the need for the web GUI

Return on Investment

Should cost less overall than using Azure native backup
Allows us to offload the backups to a 3rd party cloud for backup copies
Should make restoring our environment in case of a complete data center disaster easier and quicker

Usability

Overall it's fantastic and almost perfect. The only thing we ran into that we didn't know about before purchasing was it doesn't handle backing up and restoring of SQL databases inside the guest operating system. It only allows you to do a complete backup and restore of the entire virtual machine. Because of this we have to still use native Azure SQL backups, which isn't a show stopper but it would be nice to see this option added. Otherwise it's really easy to use, so easy that anybody could just login for the first time and probably figure it out without direction from others.

Alternatives Considered

We were already using an older version of Veeam in one data center, so the only other solution we really looked at for the Azure side was the free Microsoft Azure Backup Server and it was way too slow and clunky, as well as crashed constantly so it was definitely not worthy of looking into further.

Key Insights

Do you think Veeam Backup for Azure delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Veeam Backup for Azure's feature set?

Yes

Did Veeam Backup for Azure live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Veeam Backup for Azure go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Veeam Backup for Azure again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

I think it's best suited if you have an Azure virtual machine data center and also have on-premises data centers needing backed up. That way it keeps everything together in a single vendor suite of tools for simplification of licensing, management, and possible cost savings. If you have only Azure virtual machines, then you can just use the native backup in Azure instead which also works great.

Veeam Backup for Azure is Great!

Overall Satisfaction with Veeam Backup for Azure