As a Microsoft Office 365 customer, I am very interested in the capabilities of this product. To demonstrate this, Michael Cade (Senior Global Technologist, Product Strategy, Veeam) jumped right into a demo using his Microsoft Azure account to deploy the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 product via the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. By doing so, this deploys a Windows 2019 instance with the latest version of Veeam Backup for Office. For the most part, the default settings were left in place because this is a demo use case. If this were created for production purposes, additional settings including security considerations would have been applied.
Veeam Backup for Office has evolved over the past 4 years and Veeam is scheduled to introduce a new version in the near future. As you can see from the image below, it was originally released for Exchange Online back in 2016 with version 1 and has since matured with additional features and performance enhancements leading into version 4 which includes the ability to backup into object storage. Version 5 will include the ability to protect Microsoft Teams. Additional deployment options include the AWS Marketplace, Terraform, and Chocolatey (h\t to fellow Veeam Vanguard Maurice Kevenaar for introducing this capability to the Vanguards in a private demo). Get to know Chocolatey, you will not be disappointed!
As of version 4, the following components are included.
By this time in the presentation, the Windows 2019 virtual machine deployment in Microsoft Azure was complete and Michael dove right into the configuration of Veeam Backup for Office 365 which includes the Community Edition of VBO (a free version that includes protection ups to 10 users and 1TB of SharePoint data) which comes in handy for home lab purposes. For demo purposes, Michael invoked a PowerShell command to create the organization and three backup jobs. I need to learn PowerShell asap!!
Under Backup Infrastructure, proxies can be added or modified as needed. The default repository is the C drive by default for this deployment but this can be changed. On the Object Storage Repository screen, the data can be offloaded and is encrypted. For the Retention Policies screen, this all depends on the unique requirements for your environments.
In this scenario, Michael is running a VM in Azure and sending the data to an Amazon S3 bucket but customers also have the option to choose additional providers. Next, Michael provides his AWS credentials, location, bucket and folder. Also, storage limits can be set if they are required.
Once the backup job was complete, we reviewed the details by right clicking the desired job (EmailTest in this example) and selected Edit (the backup jobs are located under Organizations). Additionally, you can include Office 365 accounts that you would like to exclude from the job.
Using Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange, the backup can be mounted to view the Inbox including the spam emails Michael intentionally sent to this account for this demo. A very cool feature that is included is the Compare with Production option. With it, an administrator can restore and export Microsoft Exchange objects from backups created in Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365. Administrators can restore it back to the same or different user account, the desktop, a .pst or send it to a different account.
And as the demo came to a close, Michael was kind enough to give a shout out to the Veeam Vanguards.
Don’t forget to check the Community contributions made my Niels Engelen and Jorge de la Cruz.
By the way, if it were up to me I would have asked Stephen for more money on your invoice. 🙂
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