We all go through the Digital Transformation journey at our own pace. The pandemic, however, accelerated the journey for most organizations. Instead of the allotted time in years, it was done in months! This was an eye-opener for many on how dependent their core business processes are on digital technology in the event of disruption.

Digital resilience defines your capabilities for survival and forward evolution, considering that change is the only constant in a fluid, super-connected digital environment. The question to ask is, are you actively strengthening resilience for both business processes, existing digital infrastructure and new infrastructure?

Anticipating and responding to challenges ahead, learning from things that have (almost) gone wrong and evolving your resilience — Digital resilience, therefore, represents a fundamental change in the way we understand how digital technology, risk and opportunity are tied together. More secure does not mean more resilient!

V11 brings capabilities to keep your organization out of the headlines. The entire suite of products in V11 provides new and additional ways to deliver reliable ransomware recovery, ensure compliance of critical data and achieve the resiliency to recover from any scenario.

With the biggest launch in Veeam history today, we added lots of tools and opportunities for you to strengthen your digital resilience and boost business resilience. Let’s zoom into some of those tools and their features that will help you build your digital resilience.

Reliable ransomware protection and recovery

Your data is critical to keeping your business running and maintaining uptime. Avoiding data loss and keeping costs in check are the main priorities, however, effectively balancing these objectives continues to be a monumental challenge. The game is constantly changing. With workloads accelerating to multi-cloud ecosystems and workers increasingly operating remotely, data is harder to manage and control than ever before.

Hardened Repository

Ransomware attacks are getting increasingly sophisticated and will target the whole data life cycle, including backups, to cripple or block the possibility of recovery. To make sure that your digital resilience is guaranteed, you will need backups that are tamper-proof.

To prevent attacks on backups, Veeam Backup & Replication v11 introduces the “Hardened Repository” feature based on Linux. It makes backups immutable for a pre-defined amount of time, preventing modification or encryption. Leveraging this feature will strengthen your resilience against hackers, insider attacks or just accidents.

Version 11 successfully passed a third-party assessment of compliance with the U.S. financial industry regulations for WORM (Write Once Read Many) storage. A compliant hardened repository configuration ensures protection of backup data against manipulation and meets the requirements for non-rewritable, non-erasable storage as specified by SEC 17a-4(f), FINRA 4511(c) and CFTC 1.31(c)-(d). The compliance assessment was done by Cohasset Associates.

The hardened repository is set up with single-use credentials, which will enable certificate-based authentication between Veeam components and the hardened repository. These credentials are only used for installation and will not be stored anywhere. There is no requirement for a privileged user, like root, in normal operation. Only a non-privileged account with read and write access is required.

The Linux firewall is dynamically altered with rules during a job run. Dynamic ports for communication traffic will be opened at the start of the job and closed right after the job finishes.

The hardened repository role is the only role that is allowed on that server. It can be standalone or part of Veeam Scale-out Backup Repository. When you leverage Veeam Scale-out Backup Repository in combination with native immutability, you can stop ransomware in its tracks, ensure backup compliance and safeguard your recoverability from start to finish.

Archive Tier

The Scale-out Backup Repository is one of Veeam’s unique innovations that really brings a lot of capabilities to backup storage life cycle management, yet in a simple, flexible, policy-driven and reliable manner. Veeam expands customer choice in v11 by offering the option to archive to a lower cost tier of cloud storage. Archive Tier is an additional tier of storage that can be attached to a Scale-out Backup Repository.

Applicable data from the capacity extent of the Scale-out Backup Repository can be moved to the Archive Tier for archive storage. Storing archived data in Archive Tier is cheaper compared to Capacity Tier,which has long retention requirements. However, restoring data from Archive Tier will take longer and is more expensive compared to Capacity Tier. Data must be prepared for restore from Archive Tier.

You can enable the immutability feature when adding or editing an Amazon S3 Glacier object storage repository as an archive extent. The immutability feature is currently only available for Amazon S3 Glacier object storage repository.

Veeam Continuous Data Protection (CDP)

Business continuity and meeting both internal and external SLAs are things that all IT leaders keep top of mind. Requiring specialized hardware and training, solutions are often expensive in cost and complexity. Continuous Data Protection in v11 eliminates downtime and minimizes data loss for your Tier 1 VMware workloads.

CDP offers the ability for both short and long-term retention in one job. On the source side, compression and encryption is applied before it is transported to the target side where decompression and decryption is done. Encryption is optional, but this way, the data is transported safely and efficiently from source to target.

Now, you can instantly fail over to the latest state or any point in time with ultra-low RPO granularity, measured in seconds, and customize RPOs and deployment options to meet your recovery objectives without added complexity and cost. Veeam CDP brings you resilience for your most-critical workloads with near-zero RPOs.

Expanded Instant Recovery

Recovering quickly is paramount across various applications and ecosystems. For true database recovery, many operations must happen after the initial restore, adding time to recovery objectives. For NAS restores, access continuity is a challenge for all dealing with hardware failure amplified by explosive data growth. With v11, instantly recover even more of your data center’s workloads with seamless recovery for Microsoft SQL, Oracle and NAS, as well as full recovery to Hyper-V from the pioneer of Instant VM Recovery. Now, deliver immediate recovery of any failed SQL or Oracle database to production or provide uninterrupted user access to NAS data by instantly publishing an entire file share directly from a recent backup.

Endpoint protection enhanced with NEW Veeam Agent for Mac

With remote working at an all-time high, many businesses have expanded their endpoint hardware standards and are allowing more employees to use their own devices, including Apple. With this expansion and the existing high demand for MacBooks in the executive ranks and Mac Pro workstations in design, media, marketing and music industries, the call for a simple, flexible and reliable off-site capable macOS user backup is greater than ever. Veeam Backup & Replication answers that call with NEW Veeam Agent for Mac.

Meeting compliance with Veeam ONE v11

Visibility is key in meeting recovery and compliance goals, you must be able to monitor and report on your data protection environment to ensure the highest availability, prevent issues from becoming problems and prove compliance at a moment’s notice. Veeam ONE v11 brings you unified monitoring and reporting across on-premises, cloud and remote agents to ensure that ALL of your data is protected, compliant and ready for recovery.

Get unparalleled visibility into the newly added features in Veeam Backup & Replication v11, like CDP, Veeam Agent for Mac, Archive Tier and more through a new user interface with enhanced alerts and reports. Veeam ONE can even assist you in detecting possible ransomware activity!

Evolving your resilience

Data accessibility can drive your business further. Tap into the potential of modern backup to drive greater availability, security and data reuse. Reusing your backup data enables seamless and centralized access to your latest production data through data analytics tools, DevOps and business intelligence, thereby strengthening your business resilience.

Making sure you are digitally resilient gives your organization a great competitive edge and lines up the organization to maintain, adopt or recover technology-dependent systems and processes easily. When you look wide-eyed at your organization and you come to the conclusion that significant digital disruption may disable your core business processes, then digital resilience has become equivalent to business resilience for you!