What needs improvement with Veeam Backup for Office 365?

There is still a need for improvement when it comes to individual database backups, particularly for Oracle and other newer databases. The process is not user-friendly, requiring senior personnel and extensive documentation to execute backups and restoration.

Pricing could be more affordable. It would be beneficial if it were adjusted, as currently, client-based licensing for cloud-based activities can be expensive.

I would like Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 to increase the speed to reduce the backup time. This would help enhance efficiency.

I'm very satisfied with Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 and would continue using it if it were up to me. However, my management is considering alternative solutions due to issues with our storage solutions. We're at a point where we need to decide whether to scale out our existing storage (which would mean spending more money) or switch to a 365 backup service that includes its storage. The storage issue is the main reason we're considering a change. Apart from that, I'm very happy with the product. It works perfectly, the support is excellent, and it's fairly simple to manage. The app works 100% as expected. The tool needs to improve its reporting to gain more valuable insights into what data is being backed up. The reports do not provide all the information one would like. But other than that, all the features are up to standard and working perfectly.

One major drawback is that Veeam doesn't support migrating data once it's stored in object storage like S3. If we back up data to local storage, like a SAN or physical hard drives, we can migrate that data out if needed. But if we back something up to object storage, like an S3 bucket, Veeam locks us in. They don't support migrating that data out. For example, if we wanted to move from Amazon S3 to Azure Blob Storage, we couldn't do that.

If you are backing up Office 365, you're pulling the data down. If you are doing cold data archiving in the cloud, it seems like it's quicker to put it in the cloud, but it takes longer to pull it down. If it could rebuild the data without pulling down the entire chunk, I think it would be an improvement.

The product cannot back up Active Directory objects while its competitors can. Self-service power enables us to deal with service providers. We provide services for our clients, so having a multi-tenant service portal would be good. Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 needs to improve its scalability and support.

The solution needs to improve its speed.

The weaknesses in Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 primarily fall into two categories. One related to its scaling challenges when dealing with large organizations with thousands of entities to back up, it's not efficient to back up everything in a single pool. This necessitates the segmentation of backups into different subsets, which requires ongoing maintenance. This can be complex and requires significant automation efforts at the customer site to ensure backups remain consistent and complete. The second category is related to performance bottlenecks, which makes it a less-than-ideal backup platform. This can affect overall backup and restore performance. To address this, there's a need for better strategies, including monitoring performance and potentially adding input features for user inquiries or for managing backups in subsets within the Teams and SharePoint environments.

The solution should provide more integration with Teams and SharePoint Online to perform other tasks.

Microsoft already gives backup features, and therefore they don't need to go for another backup solution. I don't have any notes for improvements. It is only for Office, not for other platforms. It's a new product. It's not mature. It might need more cloud capacity.

The solution could improve by having the ability to back up without an agent installed on the system.

In some instances, a customer is not necessarily backing up Microsoft 365. For instance, they might be backing up a large Oracle database. It would be nice if they could tweak it to compress the file, so it's easier to transfer a huge file.

As with all things, the solution can be improved by reducing the cost.

If Veeam could offer backup as a service for data backup and recovery, that would be great. We'd like something like what Druva is offering at the moment. Veeam currently does not have immutable storage, so if they can introduce immutable storage for ransomware protection, that would be great. We have found the free version to be less stable.

When working with this solution, doing backups on-premises to the traditional storage is done with no compression and duplication. So if you use a device to back up with compression and duplication, the solution doesn't work. Hence, this is an improvement that can be made. Additionally, the console management system can be improved.

The solution's speed can be improved.

At this moment, I don't have any downsides to note. Veeam is quite expensive. Often, clients are looking for a less expensive option.

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

The problem that we have is that it's slow. We need bandwidth or we can't do full backup. We can't do a full backup a week. The only corporation backup is incremental and we haven't the option or the feature to do a full backup in the middle of the week. That's our problem. We call Microsoft to give us the bandwidth, however, Office doesn't integrate acceleration traffic to compress traffic. That's the problem of Veeam for Office. They could include WAN acceleration to compress the traffic to make things faster. We'd also like the option to do a full backup at any time, like in Veeam Backup and Replication. Support is very slow.

Currently, I'm working for Huawei and they dropped the support for Huawei, so that's an issue for us. The full storage is not supported anymore. We probably will need to evaluate another backup vendor now. We would like a full Linux-based solution. They still use the management platform on Windows. It should maybe also have an appliance deployment or something like that, that is pre-configured.

It requires quite an amount of infrastructure. You have to set up the instance, and you need to know quite a bit about Microsoft 365 authentication. For some customers, it is a challenge. It is also not cheap.

This is a cloud solution, and the speed can be slow sometimes. We want to try to see if somebody else can give us a solution that will be better with speed and maybe affordable or not too expensive. Veeam is working with this called immutable backup. We have no immutable backup solution in the product for files or Microsoft 365. It is not immutable right now. They were releasing a new version soon this year. After the summer, it will be exciting to see what new releases will be there.

Veeam Backup for Office 365 can improve by reducing the time it takes for backups. I have mentioned this to Veeam and hopefully, in the next version, it will be a faster backup. In a future release of Veeam Backup for Office 365, they could improve the dashboard to show simple task information.

Veaam Backup can be confusing for customers when they start trying to understand how to use the product in multiple environments. So if they're using it in both a cloud and an on-prem environment, it can get a little bit confusing as to how that actually happens and how it works.

The installation could always be a little bit easier. You do need to be a bit technical.

Veeam's performance is inconsistent.

The solution should have backup integration features, not just concerning mail but also when it comes to such solutions as SharePoint.

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.

We have found that there is a limitation in this solution where it only takes the backup of users who are using Office 365 Enterprise email IDs. We have many users in management and approximately 50 other users who are using Office 365 of which Veeam is able to capture the backup. However, for the other users who are on the local email server at that time, the solution is not able to capture the backup. In an upcoming release, there should be backup support for other email providers, such as Gmail.

Security is the most important feature. When you are working in the Cloud security is very important. They may have made changes recently, and may already have the two-factor integration, and following the security upgrades from Office themselves.

Its price could be improved.

When you add a new site for backup, it gives you a notice that there is a new site, but the way you select that and configure that could be slightly better. It works, but it is not always very clear. For example, for the URL, you need to hover over the title or the name of the site. You should see it immediately on the screen. It should have a better user interface for selecting what you want to back up so that you get a more clear overview of the sites that are there and the ones that you want to combine in a backup. Its user interface should be more user-friendly. It has a lot of scrolling and doesn't give you a complete overview when needed. That's the main thing why it is not very user-friendly. It should have a better user interface.

The environment mainly consists of PCs, although we have students and a few teachers that use Apple computers. Sometimes, we have compatibility issues related to this and the problems can take a long time to solve. Faster response time to complaints that we have had would be of great appreciation. When you work with these cloud-based systems, the response time could be better. I never take anything for granted. When people complain about something, I always check in three different settings with different internet connections and different locations. I find that when it comes to Office, the response time could be improved quite a bit. Some additional training materials would be helpful.

The license pricing can be reduced.

It's hard to predict the usage on the storage. I need to make some estimates for customers in terms of how much storage will be needed on the cloud, and this is always tricky. It would be helpful if they could help us estimate storage or simplify the estimation portion. They could work on their SaaS model to make it a bit more appealing.

They can provide a dashboard for sizing. This feature might get included in the next release.

It would help if the initial setup was easier. It's a bit complex. When the next upgrade to the solution happens, they should work to adjust this. The solution could offer better reporting.

One of the things that should probably be improved is the pricing model. The price is based on a per-user charge. I wish that was not the case because it is not really in use by most of the users. It is not all that often that people need something restored. I do not know how they would change it exactly, but it just does not seem appropriate. If they can change their pricing model, that is only going to help to get more people to adopt it. They could make it more affordable. A better pricing model would just make sense and be better for some companies. We do not have an issue, thank goodness. But some companies might be a little bit strapped for cash. As a solution that completes their backup regimen, it is a requirement whether they know it or not. You hate to see the pricing make the decision and exclude people from something that they essentially need. If they could make it more affordable, that would be better for everybody. As far as adding features, unless Office changes, they do not need to change their feature set. It is already feature-rich. It has a really nice GUI and it is very easy to manage once you get logged in. So no, right now I would not change anything. Change is not always a good thing.

The price could be reduced to make it more competitive. We would like to have a single management console for all of our backups.

The implementation of this solution needs to be improved. They add multiple features and new versions, which makes it very difficult to follow. They need more documentation, awareness, and assistance. In the next release, an additional feature would be to have the disaster recovery where the data could restore automatically.

It needs to be able to integrate with other emailing systems, like Linux.

In the next release, it should have direct export to tape drive abilities and NDMP support.

Technical support could be improved. I would like to see the management tool support faster recovery time.

It would be a great improvement to be able to recover cover a VM straight to on-prem.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the future I think that Veeam needs to support more easily, more databases and more services like SaaS services. They should improve the backup and restoration time.