Improved ransomware protection and Kubernetes-based cloud native integration are coming to the Veeam backup and replication suite later this year. Veeam previewed its planned product updates on Wednesday during this week’s VeeamON 2022 conference in Las Vegas.

CTO Danny Allan (pictured above, onstage at VeeamON 2022) led demonstrations of its annual release road map starting with seventh version of Veeam Backup 365. Allan and his team also showed version 12 of its flagship Veeam Backup and Replication platform. Also previewed were a new backup offering for Salesforce data. Additionally, Allan showcased ransomware protection features in the company’s Veeam One security reporting tool and Veeam Disaster Recovery Orchestrator.

Building on the findings Veeam’s ransomware report, outlined on Tuesday, Allan underscored the detection and recovery capabilities in its offerings. A ransomware attack can be just as devastating as a natural disaster, he emphasized. “Ransomware is a disaster,” Allan told attendees. “When you get hit by ransomware, you’re not just recovering a single VM, you’re doing dozens or hundreds at a time.”

Veeam Backup and Replication v12

Veeam Backup and Replication is the company’s flagship offering with more than 1 million active installations, according to Allan. Since releasing v11 last year, Allan said Veeam counts 850,000 installations among its 450,000 customers.

The new Veeam Backup and Replication v12 release will provide disaster recovery as-a-service, support for object storage and data mobility. During a briefing with media and analysts, Allan said customers can backup on-premises data to the cloud in real time.

“And they can failover and failback literally to the second,” Allan said. “You could say ‘I saw an incident yesterday of a potential compromise and I want to roll back to yesterday at 2:37 and 17 seconds’ and it has that capability.”

The object storage support comes as more organizations are using services such as Amazon’s S3 and Microsoft’s Azure Blob Storage. Version 12 will allow direct writes to object storage,

“As a repository for data historically, that’s been very challenging, the performance hasn’t been there,” Allan said. “But we’re actually seeing the reliability, the resiliency, the availability and the performance of object storage.”

Veeam Backup and Replication v12 will also offer centralized views and the ability to integrate and manage Kubernetes clusters. It will include a plug-in to Kasten by Veeam K10 V5.0, previewed on Monday and set for release next month.

“In a single management console, you can manage every single physical system that Veeam can protect, and every single cloud that Veeam can protect,” Allan said. The Kasten K10 V5.0 release will also offer hardened security and improved ransomware detection.

The new data mobility capability will enable administrators to move all workloads whether they’re virtual or containers, across clouds. “It actually abstracts the cloud,” Allan said.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v7

New features coming to Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 include complete visibility of the environment, real-time alerting and more detailed reporting. Veeam claims there are now 11 million paid users of Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365. That’s a 73% year-over-year increase, the company reported. Veeam rolled out the latest release, v6, in March.

The v7 update, planned for release later this year, will come with various security protection and reporting features. It will also integrate with Veeam One, adding “enterprise-grade” monitoring and reporting. The management console will offer a single view of the entire Microsoft 365 backup environment and all its components. Veeam is also adding real-time vulnerability alerts and more detailed reports.

Veeam Backup for Salesforce

Veeam last year said the company was building on its Microsoft 365 data protection solution with a similar offering for Salesforce. During Wednesday’s keynote, Allan said Veeam considers its use of Salesforce to be among the largest and most complex.

“With 450,000 customers millions of contacts and leads, we need to protect that data,” Allan said. “And so, what we did is we created a product that has the control and flexibility that was needed.” That control includes allowing customers to deploy the backup environment anywhere, he said. It uses Salesforce’s native APIs, which enables restores of Salesforce records, fields, files and metadata as well as hierarches.