Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 Reviews

We've been using Veeam Backup for about a year. We get a lot of inquiries, whether it be from our partners or from end-users, who would like to backup their Office 365. They inquire about how to do so and the prerequisites, what exactly is required. Generally speaking, their concern is about how much storage is needed for the backup. Every company has a different backup policy, different RPOs, and different pre-pension policies. We help them determine how much storage they are going to need. That's basically it. That's how we deal with it.

A lot of customers have the misconception that when they host their data on the cloud, the cloud providers actually protect the data. Meanwhile, cloud providers are generally responsible for the availability of the service. The data is always the responsibility of whoever owns it. Nobody can ensure the data will always be there. So there are many news cases that happened. Sometimes people lose data on Office 365. For example, some emails get deleted and they seek the attention of Office 365. On average it has been discovered that it takes about 140 days to discover the email was deleted.

Employees can get disgruntled all of a sudden. There have also been hardware attacks on Office 365, even though there is cybersecurity in Microsoft. Nothing is bulletproof in the cybersecurity industry, so it's always good to have a second copy of your data.

A really good feature I saw is backing up company emails for the enterprises. This offers an easy ability to restore to the cloud.

The other really amazing part is that it doesn't just stop at Office 365. For example, some people have a hybrid setup. They have non-private exchange email software and then they have a hybrid with the Office 365. It is useful for that use case because it can back up both of them at the same time.

A lot of people when looking for backups usually consider a lot of sites. With the Veeam Backup application, you can have really good compression and deduplication ratios. That means you can save lots of space on your backup storage. With Veeam for Office 365 for companies that require long-term retention, they often complain about the capacity storage it might take. There's no deduplication on that level. Basically, storage capacity can be required to be huge in some cases.

But the good part is that exclusions can be made to save on the storage space. The general feedback I get from the market is that there is no deduplication.

The capacity storage is a challenge everywhere in the backup industry. The general feedback people are coming back to us about is that there is no deduplication based on it. There is compression which uses the native Office 365 compression, but there is no deduplication feature just like in Veeam Backup application.

I'm not sure technically if it's possible to deduplicate Office 365 dockets. However, I'd like to see native page support for Veeam Backup for Office 365 to be able to back up to the tapes. I'm at a company with long retention and I backup disk space storage, so it's going to cost me a fortune. Meanwhile, if I preserve a short term retention plan, like Backup, if I need to have backups for three years for example, then I'll need huge amounts of storage. Now storage can be expensive or it can be cheap. This base storage is useful for short time retention. For example, keep it for one month, and then you can archive it on tape for the rest of the year. So, this is not good in a situation where a company needs to restore from a long time retention, and tape is really inexpensive. 

I'd like to see Veeam Backup for Office 365 backup to tapes, support cloud object storage. Now, the new trend for archiving data is not just on tapes and data deduplication appliances. This is considered really old technology. Deduplication appliances are only fit for the enterprise customers but they can be expensive and save lots of data.

So the only real need for it is in enterprise but some small companies would like to archive their data for a long time. They find financial challenges to do so. Nowadays, they look to this new cloud object storage with cloud providers like Azure Blob Storage, Amazon S3, or IBM. That can really be useful for archival. So, basically supporting archive tier storage for the Veeam Backup for Office 365. Archive tier storage, whether it be the deduplication appliances, cloud object storage, or tapes.

But like I said, it's probably on the way. Veeam distributes new products as well. It's not as old as Office 365 for the market. When you look at Veeam Backup and Replication and how long they have come, it's probably on the way there. And there are programs to do all that I have mentioned if the client is also using Veeam Backup with Replication. You can basically install Veeam Backup for Office 365 with a VM and just back it up using the Veeam Backup with Replication, then you can get use out of the deduplication and archive to the cloud by a virtual machine. There are workarounds too.

Although the Veeam Backup for Office 365 doesn't natively support all the things that I told you about, like archiving to tape, deduplication appliance, or cloud object storage, it can always be installed in a virtual machine and then that virtual machine can be backed up by Veeam Backup with Replication, which supports all of this. It's considered a workaround, not native support.

To be honest, it's pretty stable. It's the third major release for it. It is showing lots of improvements. Not any issues with the product at all, whether it be with backing-up or the servers. Office 365 itself is pretty new to the regional market, where we are. It's not a new product, but its prevalence is starting to hit Saudi Arabia distribution.

I can't say I've used it that much, but I have used it enough to consider it a stable software.

This is the big one about Veeam in general. The good part about Veeam is that they make modular solutions, so you can install Veeam Backup for Office 365 and Veeam Backup and Replication in one single server. You can do an all in one installation, and roll it out.

Some scenarios may require that you scale-out. You can dedicate modular components to specific services. In that case, you need backup for Office 365, that's not like Veeam Backup and Replication.

There are basically three major Veeam components for Office 365: Backup Server, Backup Repository, and Backup Proxy. In short, Backup Server is the granular solution. It's basically responsible for managing the tasks and jobs of all the other components. Backup Proxy is basically the muscle of the solution. So, this is what actually is interacting with Office 365 and doing the actual backup. It is coordinating Veeam Backup Server to do that. Veeam Backup for Office 365 Repository is where you store your backups. Any storage that is presented to the Windows operating system, you can use as a storage for the Veeam backup storage for 365. So long as you have internet connectivity, no firewalls in place (or specifically the required firewall forced to be open would be the Office 365), and you have the administrative privileges for Office 365, it's an easy task.

There are a lot of companies that use Veeam backup for Office 365, and those companies range from 15 users to 5,000 users. There are a few use cases. Some companies have compliance standards that force them to have a specific backup policy and a specific retention policy. That is kind of hard to do manually. Some people just prefer to have a solution that also meets that and makes it easy. Some people just want to take control of their own details. Some people are actually upset about protecting their data.

Most of the users we deal with are shared. They are behind the entire IT environment. The main pitch from our end is based on the fact that this edition is really easy to use, and we think you should try it and see that. There are a lot of challenges in the market. Our companies don't usually have dedicated IT personnel for everything. They usually share one IT person or all the IT folks for all the workflows of the IT department. 

So, it's basically a decision criterion for them, whether they want to have a solution that's really easy to use and manage. It doesn't require more than one person, but from a backup perspective, the best practice is always to have some redundancy on it. You can have two, but you don't really need two people. It's just for the case that if someone doesn't show up to work or something goes wrong with backups and that guy is not available, someone else should be there. But purely speaking, it's a one man job, and he can also share with the other IT workload.

Veeam is good in general, from a technical support perspective. I've really enjoyed the fact that they have a really high response rate. You can just open a support ticket and call them on the phone so you know that they got it. You refer to the ticket number and you just have a remote engineer also engage in technical support. They are very supportive in general, I love the support there.

I enjoy it because it helps me a lot when I am with a client and an issue presents itself that I'm not able to resolve. I open a support ticket, call the toll free number, and have an engineer engage with me within five minutes, which is amazing for my establishment. They will start working on the problem and resolve it.

It's as easy as downloading the file, installing it, and then simply entering the administrative accounts for Office 365. You also need internet access. It's really an easy task to do with Veeam Backup Office 365. Literally just clicking next, next, next.

So from an ease of use perspective, it's really easy. It's just that when enterprise companies come to deploy it, they might face a bit of a challenge in this region specifically when it comes to internet bandwidth, because sometimes in Saudi Arabia bandwidth is a huge restriction for organizations that have, for example, 5,000 users or huge mailboxes. It's really expensive to have corporate internet in Saudi Arabia. So it can be a challenge backing up these environments under restricted bandwidths. It's not a restriction from the solution. It's just a regional restriction. Other markets can enjoy the privilege of backing up without any issues related to bandwidth.

It's also deployable on the cloud. That's an option. But in our region, some government entities don't allow that.

I did a proof of concept a week ago. We were backing up a physical server using the other product. That took us about half an hour. During that half an hour, I downloaded Veeam Backup for Office 365 from the website. I joined the client's Office 365 account. I downloaded and installed Veeam Backup for Office 365. Then I asked for the client to enter his credentials for the Office 365, and boom. We were seeing all the mailboxes and we just started to back up from there.

Backup does take some time, of course, because the mailbox was pretty huge. Generally, ease of use and configuration is pretty simple. It's easy to use, straightforward, actually.

Part of my job is that I install this software for proof of concepts. Some clients come to us with concerns like, "How do I backup my Office 365?" We'll provide the proof concept for them. I do that as well.

There are other options, because Veeam backup for Office 365 is the software, which you can put on your own platform by backing up from the internet, or you can install it on any Windows VM on the cloud as well. There are other options like NetApp, which has software in the server, in which you don't have to really worry about installing the software onto anything. Or you can install the software, but they'll back up the data for you and keep it. Some clients may not be keen towards that with the privacy component. Also, some clients want to have a copy of the data with themselves.

However, it is also heedless when it comes to infrastructure resources. You don't have to worry about having servers put in place, dedicated for Veeam backup for Office 365 and the storage that you need, and then worry about the bandwidth that you need. These kinds of operational costs are considerations as well. I've heard about NetApp having Office 365 backup solutions, but I've never even thought deep into it. Also, some clients kind of do the backup manually as well. It's kind of a tedious job, though. Maybe when it's a small environment, it can be manageable, but for a big environment, it can be a nightmare.

Honestly speaking, lots of people just look at it from a business point of view. They say, "I just have a business need. I just want to backup my Office 365 data." But they don't take much concern into what that also requires. Generally speaking, from a backup point of view, the biggest concern is what percentage of data you'd like to backup and the capacity of this data.

Also consider what the recovery point objectives are, meaning how frequently do you want to do backups. What kind of retention policy are you trying to achieve? The shorter the retention policy, the smaller the storage capacity you need, and the lower the cost of the solution. At the same time, some people are tied by their clients and by specific retention policies. So, tell people they need to archive their backups into deduplication appliances to save on the cost of long-term archival. However, that's not natively possible with Veeam backup for Office 365 yet. I believe it can be done manually, though.

That's what clients need to be careful of and the really important part is to make sure they have enough storage for what they are trying to achieve as they prepare their backup plan. The internet bandwidth for this also needs to be considered. It is best to have a dedicated channel for this. Think about the use of backups and make sure it is properly sized. Then they should be good to go. They should be worrying about the details, the sizing, and design of the solution to fit their needs. Other than that, so long as that process goes well, it should be pretty seamless after that.

This product is a really decent product so it would be unfair for me to rate it because I'm not familiar with other products that compete with it. Generally speaking from my experience, this solution is very good, but it also has some room for improvement. On the other hand, it's tough because the product is really amazing. It's just really new. I'm pretty sure the improvements will come along the way. I'll give it a nine out of ten.

When we work with physical infrastructure, we use a Veeam agent to protect that workload, but we use Veeam for Office 365 to protect workloads in 365. 

The most valuable feature is the built-in integration with Office 365, which helps us protect email accounts and servers. We use it on virtual servers on the cloud with Azure, or we can use an agent on physical servers.

A while back, I had some trouble using the agent. It might be a problem with older versions. Sometimes, I also have issues installing or making backups from the console to that type of operating system.

I started using Veeam for 365 around a year ago.

I rate Veeam eight out of 10 for stability.

I rate Veeam Backup for 365 nine out of 10 for scalability.

I rate Veeam support seven out of 10. 

Neutral

Setting up Veeam is easy and intuitive. One or two people can deploy it depending on the number of devices or the workload. 

I rate Veeam eight out of 10 for affordability. 

I rate Veeam Backup for Office 365 eight out of 10 overall. Veeam works and is so straightforward. I can recommend it.

Our primary use case for this solution is performing backups.

The solution is costly and it could be improved by making it cheaper.

We have been using this solution for quite some time.

The solution is stable. With the options available, it's the only one we've used. 

The solution is scalable. However, it depends on the client and whether they are small to medium-sized or large enterprises.

I have not encountered customer service and support.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward.

I rate the pricing a six out of ten.

We have a demo on Druva and we are currently assessing other options.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten. The solution is good but can be improved by reviewing the price. I advise users considering the product to have at least 30 to 60 days of testing.

We are distributors for Veeam.

The use case for this solution is for backup. 

The challenging part is that people don't understand the importance of having a backup of Office 365. They think that their data is on the cloud and it's safe. They don't feel the need to back it up. Once they learn about the Microsoft shared responsibility model, they find out that Microsoft is not responsible for the data.

If, for example, an employee deletes his emails because he is angry with the management and leaves the company, the company will need a backup to restore at some point.

There are various reasons for backing up Office 356. There could be a cyberattack, and there are compliance requirements. 

Even if Microsoft will protect their data, they will still need a copy of it, and the software will help with that. 

Some people have a hybrid setup and will not only have Office 365, but they will be using a mix of Exchange on-premises and Office 365 that they need a backup of. 

The most important part is to have your data accessible and restorable at any point.

The support for deduplication appliances is an area to consider for improvement. 

They don't have native integration with deduplication of storage. 

Also, they said that they were going to release a feature, with the ability to backup copies, having another copy of a backup is very much needed, rather than just one copy. 

This feature is known in Veeam in their on-premises solutions but is not included in Office 365.

I am an expert in Veeam Backup for Office 365.

I have been dealing with Veeam as a company for five years, and Veeam Backup for Office 365 as a product for three years.

I am not able to tell you how many customers we have because we are in the distribution business, and there are many. 

We mainly support an ecosystem of partners of no less than a thousand partners, who also sell this product to many customers. Veeam is the fastest, growing vendor in the backup industry, and it is difficult to keep track of how many customers are using the product.

Technical support in Veeam is good. It usually doesn't fail you. If you face any issues, the response times are good and the engineers' quality is also good. Most of the time.

Veeam Backup for Office 365 is a Windows software application, and you can install it on-premises or you can install it on the cloud.

As long as you have a Windows Server, the installation is really easy. 

The download, installation, and configuration will not take more than 20 minutes.

It is strictly subscribed on a per-user basis.

I would recommend this solution. If you have Office 365 you should have a backup. Veeam will help you to do that.

I would rate Veeam Backup for Office 365 an eight out of ten.

Our customers primarily use the solution as a backup for on-premises because they have nothing on the cloud. They want to be sure that they have the data backed up at least on their side. Before that, the exchange server was on-site and on-premises. The clients put it all in Office 365 and now they want to have a backup on-premises.

The solution is easy to use. It's very simple and clients find it very easy to find all objects and things they need with the Veeam Explorer. The solution is very simple in terms of backing up objects as well. With Veeam, a lot of features are built-in, as opposed to some competitors, such as Avamar. It's also easier to use than Avamar if you were to compare them.

The solution announced many features two years ago, and they still have not happened, so I would hope that the next release has these ready to go.

The solution is very stable.

Scalability is good. It's very simple.

The initial setup is very straightforward. Deployment takes about a half-day. If I was a customer who bought a Data Domain, a physical appliance, and Veeam virtual, it would take one day to have the Data Domain up and then to add Veeam. You only need one person for deployment and maintenance.

We help clients with the implementation.

We are a Veeam partner. We handle the on-premises deployment model.

If you are a company that needs simple virtualizations and if you don't have very complex applications, I would recommend the solution.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten. It's not quite suitable for complex systems. If you have, for example, a CSS share, you can't backup using Veeam. 

We use the solution primarily to protect data. 

We were not aware of the fact that Microsoft was not engaged, could not be, or we were not aware of the fact that it was not possible to engage the responsibility of Microsoft in case we lose or face corrupt data. We thought Microsoft was in charge of all the security and the workload protection. Since we have learned we are not fully protected, and after hearing of some bad experiences from friends, we started using this solution to protect our data and to be sure that no matter what happens, we can get our data from Office 365, and especially, Teams.

In the past, when someone was leaving the company, it was really difficult to keep his data without decommissioning the license allotted to this employee. Today, we can reuse the license. We are assured that the data is already safe.

With Veeam Backup for Office 365, it is possible to save an employee's mailbox and decommission the license to reuse it for another person without losing the data.

The most valuable feature is flexibility. It offers good retention of policy features. We have a lot of flexibility in terms of scheduling or setting our data retention policy. We can retain our data at our convenience, which is really useful.

It is very easy to set up the solution. 

The solution is very scalable.

The solution is stable.

It has a good help center.

The integration and the coverage of all the features related to the protection of Teams could be improved. With this solution, not all the elements of Teams are protected. You have all the data, however, since Teams interacts with many other pieces of software on the Office package, it's sometimes a bit complicated to recover all the functions simultaneously. For sure, you have the data, yet not all the functions. When you recover Teams, you have to, let's say, set some other settings manually. It would be really interesting to have all the processes automated since it's so time-consuming to do it manually.

I've used the solution for just under two years. I've used it for about 19 months so far. 

The solution is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. 

It is a scalable solution. 

The process of adding more users to extend your license is really easy. They're really reactive.

We have about 1,000 people on the solution right now.

Technical support is really helpful and responsive. The only downside is sometimes it takes a bit of time when we need keys changed. 

Neutral

I have not previously used a different solution. 

The product is very straightforward and simple to set up. You do not even need to be an expert to set it up. While the design is another story, the installation is really easy.

How long it takes to deploy depends on your existing architecture. It depends on how you want to integrate the product. If you are in a company with, let's say, 100 users, it could take you one hour to put it in place, without the time consumed by the design, as the most important part of the deployment is the design. It is the phase that takes a lot of time. That said, setting it up is very easy as soon as everything has been designed.

We did not need the help of any third party. 

The local teams did it. However, we have leveraged the knowledge base part of Veeam, called the help center. They have a lot of information there, which was really useful for us.

We have seen an ROI. We have been saved from incidents by this solution many times. We've avoided corruption of data, and we are not losing time thinking about how data could be protected. It's agile and we are protected well. 

We pay for licensing every year. The license is purchased for a specific number of users. You can have a license for one year or many years - up to five years, for example. 

We are a partner and customer.

We are not using the latest version of the solution. We haven't yet done the latest update. 

I'd recommend the solution to other users and organizations. 

This solution brought us a lot of flexibility on how we can manage and care about our data, as far as Office 365 is concerned.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Our primary use for this solution in our company is for backing up emails.

It provides us with a more reliable solution for backing up Office 365 emails.

It is an easy-to-use solution for what we need it to do. A simple program that accomplishes exactly what we need.

I think the program is very good as is and we get everything that we need from it, but everything can use improvement. For me, the only obvious part of the program that could use improvement would be in the interface. If it were possible to make it more user-friendly it would be even more simple to use, and I think they can do some improvement. The backup is okay and does what it is expected to do.

We are satisfied with the stability for the most part. We had some problems a few times, but the most time it's stable. I would say it is stable more than 90 percent of the time.

I do think the program is scalable as it has a lot of options for improving volume and processing. Right now we haven't had much reason to scale it ourselves and just maintain it. We use two people to take care of the product. Even if you had much heavier use than we do you would not need more than two people.

I have not had any reason to contact technical support. As far as I know and from what I hear they're really good at supporting their products.

We previously used a solution from CodeTwo that was a suite of backup tools. We decided to change what we were using because we realized that there could likely be other solutions that were better. We found that Veeam was easier to use and it's more stable.

The main difference between the products is the stability. The other product wasn't really stable in the hybrid environment which is what prompted us to look at other solutions that would be satisfactory. The new product is really stable whether we use it in the hybrid cloud or on-premises, so I think that's the main difference and it is a better solution for our clients.

The initial setup is straightforward and pretty simple. In total, it took about one or two hours to do the installation and configuring. Most products take more time so comparably it was not so long. It's an easy solution to maintain and I think that really one person should be enough to install and monitor it in most situations. 

We are a reseller, so we do the deployments and implementations ourselves with our own technical team. Being a reseller is part of the reason we have two on our maintenance team.

The pricing for the product is okay. It's not cheap but I would not say it is expensive either. I think the pricing is fair considering the competition and that the product works easily.

Besides the fact that we were already using CodeTwo, we didn't evaluate other products. Because we already know the product was also made specifically for backing up Office 365 email, Veeam was reviewed well and it was the only one we evaluated.

Other people who are considering this solution will probably be good to go with it if it solves what they want it to do. Even without improvement, the program is really simple to use. I think sometimes it takes a long time to learn new programs and it really shouldn't be necessary when you are doing a simple thing. People who are in doubt should just try it to compare with other solutions because it is really good. They will find out quickly how it compares.

At the moment I think we have all we need for backing up our Office 365 emails reliably, we have a solid solution with this product so I don't see any reason it would have to change.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a nine. It is very near to getting a ten, but it isn't perfect. I give it a nine instead of a ten to leave the company a little room to improve the product interface.

The solution is mainly used for production. If they lose connectivity to the cloud, they will have a backup on hand. 

We just mainly use the solution for a backup. We haven't tested too many features. The mailboxes and the site mount correctly, so, we can retrieve data from it. It's rather simple. Thus far, that's the best feature.

You can't really edit. For example, if you have created a backup for a user, you can't drill down on a granular level during the backup. You have to back up the mailbox completely. It would be helpful if you could at least go inside the mailboxes to choose what you want. 

The same is true for SharePoint. For example, if I have Sharepoint with many other folders in it, if I want to remove one of the folders, I need to remove the site completely first. That's a bit hectic. I have to remove the site completely and then go ahead and then re-add it afterward without the photos I don't want. If you could just go ahead and edit these sites, that would be great. 

Granularity should be implemented in backup for both SharePoint and Mailboxes. 

The stability is good.

I believe the solution is very scalable. We can continuously add mailboxes and sites.

We haven't had to contact technical support. We have managed to correct all of the errors we've encountered so far. There haven't been any issues with the software; it was mainly with other things like Microsoft 365 and the sites. We've had no issues with the software itself.

We didn't previously use another solution.

The initial setup was rather simple. 

Deployment was done in one day, however, we had to do the backups for each mailbox. These took time. Those backups took more than a month because of the size of the mailboxes. You only need one person for deployment and maintenance.

We handled the deployment ourselves.

We are a consultancy and we also handle implementation and support.

We use an on-premises deployment model.

For those considering implementing the solution, I would say to just go for it. We really like it. We are a Veeam consumer, so we use Veeam for our data center backup ourselves and offer it to our clients as well.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.