The Best of What’s Around
It has been a month since 11:11 Systems announced a new partnership with Veeam and AWS, bringing together global leaders in data protection and modern cloud architecture. That month has been quite a busy one for us as we begin rolling out solutions that leverage the best from our partnership and bring a new generation of services to 11:11 Systems’ core capabilities. Today we have production-level services available around the globe to make use of the innovations outlined in this post.
For any product we build, the focus is on our three key pillars: Cloud, Connectivity, and Security. Our new AWS-integrated products allow us greater capability to make use of all three pillars. With each of our new Veeam and AWS powered services, we have specifically put our efforts into innovating towards the security side. Because backup and disaster recovery—now and in the future—must be inherently as secure as technology allows. To know more about the “why” of the relationship between 11:11 Systems, Veeam, and AWS, I recommend that you check out this post from Ian Sanderson. It will help you become familiar with the services we are currently offering and what we’ll be offering soon.
11:11 Cloud Backup for Microsoft 365
Leading the way in released AWS Veeam platforms will be the updated version of our award-winning Cloud Backup for Microsoft 365. This solution is based on Veeam’s Backup for Microsoft 365 product and includes the following features:
- Highly Performant Off-Cloud Backups. When you look at many of the other services that are offering protection of Microsoft 365 they tend to center around keeping the data within the Microsoft Azure Cloud. With 11:11 Systems’ service, we have in many cases written a book on how to scale backups of Microsoft 365 workloads to offload locations, leaving customers with comparable performance and pricing while providing superior protection.
- End-to-End Encryption. All backups destined for object storage platforms are encrypted in flight and at rest.
- 11:11 Console Integration. This service can be accessed via our intuitive user interface for managing backups and restores.
- NEW! Secondary Backup Copies with Immutability. With our new architecture based on AWS infrastructure and Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 version 7 we will be able to support the option of a secondary copy of your backup data with true object-lock enabled immutability. This combination allows you to fully meet the requirements for a 3-2-1 compliant data protection policy.
- NEW! Granular, Per-Copy Retention Policies. Since we first began offering backup for Microsoft 365, our messaging has been centered around providing “Keep Forever” retention. Often our customers and general best practices dictate that this isn’t really the optimal method as it may contradict organizational data retention policies. We’ve listened to these concerns and built that into our new model, allowing customers to work with our onboarding teams to create policy-driven retention time frames for both primary and secondary copies that adhere to your own requirements.
11:11 Cloud Backup for Veeam Cloud Connect
Veeam Cloud Connect Backup is a product that 11:11 is extremely well-known for, as we were an early adopter of the technology. We’ve always been at the forefront of innovation for this solution. As we expand our footprint into the public cloud, this was always going to be a service that we felt would benefit from a more modern, cloud-first architecture.
So, what’s changing? We are making use of the combined capabilities of Veeam Cloud Connect, 11:11 Systems architecture, and AWS infrastructure to provide you a best-of-breed cloud backup service that will continue to be charged in the same storage-based model, while providing many cloud- and security-first principles:
- Minimum 30 Days Immutability. We are leaning into a security-first mindset and setting the floor at the minimum amount that a customer should have to protect against modern ransomware attacks. We recognize that no two customers have the same needs, so you will be able to increase the amount of immutability all the way up to six months at the time of setup.
- Mandatory Encryption of Backup Data. Due to the requirement for an active full backup to be run to enable encryption after initial run, customers often find themselves in a position where they believe they have created encryption keys on their backups, but the keys have not been applied. To help you with ensuring your data is encrypted both in flight and at rest, we will be enabling our backup servers to require all data be encrypted. If you mistakenly do not enable encryption, the job will fail until encryption is applied.
- Object-Backed Storage. As this service will natively be powered by Veeam Backup and Replication version 12 we will be making use of their newly enhanced support for object storage to underly our platform in AWS. What does this mean to you the customer? All the security and scalability benefits of object storage are available while still maintaining the greater management and recoverability uses of Veeam Cloud Connect. Further, the service will now support the spaceless full backups feature of v12 allowing you to store as many GFS restore points as you need in the cloud without consuming additional storage.
- No Need for Insider Protection. The insider Protection service is a great feature of on-premises deployed Veeam Cloud Connect backups and has and will continue to serve us well when those backups are sent to our traditional data centers. That said, when Veeam Cloud Connect is coupled with object storage immutability, there is no need for Insider Protection and as such we will not be supporting it when deployed to our AWS-based platforms.
11:11 Cloud Object Storage
As good as Veeam Cloud Connect Backup is, there are still many use cases where you want to directly consume object storage. While 11:11 has long provided S3-compatible object storage services free of egress, retrieval, and API-related fees, we wanted to be able to provide this service through our AWS partnership as well. Through the power of our relationship with AWS, we’ve been able to offer access to the One Zone-Infrequent Access S3 product with several enhancements, resulting in a service much like our existing Object Storage service but with a more global footprint in terms of availability. This service has all the benefits and availability of S3 1Z-IA but without Egress, Data retrieval, or API call fees.
Coming Soon! 11:11 Managed Backup for AWS
Finally in the coming months you should see announcements from us about support for a Software as a Service model backup for AWS native workloads built upon Veeam Cloud Connect and Veeam Backup for AWS version 6. This service provides more flexibility than native tools with much less complexity for the most common AWS cloud-first services; EC2, EFS, RDS and VPCs.
Conclusion
As you can see it’s been a busy month here at the corner of 11:11, Veeam, and AWS. It is exciting to innovate with great vendors and partners to create solutions to many global business challenges—for enterprises and SMBs alike. If you are interested in these services, please do reach out to our teams today so we can start talking about how to make data protection in the cloud work for you!
