New network-attached storage (NAS) backup capabilities and improved ransomware protection are now built into the latest version of Veeam Availability Suite v10, giving businesses a deeper data backup and data management toolbox for protecting their IT operations.

The new version of Veeam Availability Suite now incorporates Amazon S3 Object Lock, which dramatically improves the protection of data backups by locking them tightly so they can’t be deleted by cyber criminals as part of ransomware attacks, the company said.

Rick Vanover, Veeam’s senior director of product strategy, told Channel Futures that the broadened features in the latest version will expand the ability of channel partners to go into any customer IT environment and better serve their needs.

Veeam’s Rick Vanover

“The NAS backup capabilities will resonate with partners,” said Vanover. “This is something our customers have been asking about for years. This has also been raised at our partner meetings. This is continual progress through the feedback of our partner community.”

The inclusion of the new Amazon S3 Object Lock capabilities means that partners can help their customers be even more resilient against ransomware, said Vanover.

“This is something that is an immediate value-add for resellers and partners. It means customers can put their backups in the cloud and then lock them so they cannot be deleted” by attackers, he said. “It’s one of those technologies that isn’t necessarily new, but it requires an ISV like Veeam to be very specific on how we have implemented that technology.”

The updated suite also includes multi-VM instant recovery capabilities to automate disaster recovery, widened platform extensibility, data mining through APIs and more than 150 other enhancements for users.

Dante Orsini, the senior vice president of business development for Iland Cloud, a cloud service provider and Veeam channel partner, said this Veeam suite update provides a wide range of incremental improvements for customers, but the new NAS backup capabilities are the biggest advancement.

Iland Cloud’s Dante Orsini

“As ransomware gets more and more complex, some of these things are not only targeting backups but also backup copying jobs,” said Orsini. “So the S3 Object Lock feature is a very big deal. If you’re running on an S3 compatible object store, you can take advantage of that, which is the gold standard of protection.”

Making the S3 Object Lock coverage even more effective, he said, is that Veeam customers can use it alongside Veeam’s Cloud Connect offering, making the combination even more powerful for users’ data backups.

With the addition of NAS backup capabilities, Veeam backup can now protect data on a wide range of systems, including NAS, virtual, physical, Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor (AHV), Hyper-V, public cloud and more.

“It’s one piece of software that can do it all,” said Orsini. “That’s why it’s so valuable to the channel. The big thing, from the channel perspective, is that it allows a partner to work with a customer regardless of where the customer’s data resides, including on premises, hybrid, off premises or public cloud. It’s just very flexible to use.”

Steven Hill, an IT analyst with 451 Research, told Channel Futures that the version 10 of the Veeam suite offers a laundry list of enhancements and features, many of which are in response to the evolving industry focus on business continuity (BC), disaster recovery (DR) and system availability.

“This is part of the continued evolution from traditional backup to dynamic, hybrid disaster recovery, and BC/DR is an increasingly complex formula because today’s IT has a much larger list of moving parts,” said Hill. “The challenge for data-protection vendors lies in combining backup with the growing need for protecting both data and workloads and reducing the risk and impact of downtime.”

For vendors like Veeam, taking the complexity out of adopting hybrid infrastructure while continuing to expand their platforms to leverage new capabilities, meet shifting customer requirements and insure industry compliance will be critically important, said Hill.

“In the past, backup was the only tool we had for BC/DR, but today there’s a growing focus on system availability as well as data protection,” he said. “Today’s business is increasingly dependent on IT systems and the application migration, instant recovery and ransomware protection capabilities that are part of the Veeam Availability Suite v10. They are major tools for protecting against some of the most common causes of system outages.”