As enterprises mature in their cloud journey more and more are pivoting to the idea of not putting all their eggs in one basket. 81% in fact according to a Gartner survey. In the customer meetings I attend this statistic seems to hold true because a multi-cloud approach enables firms to structure the most cost effective solutions depending on the SaaS/PaaS/IaaS applications that fits their needs best. A multi-cloud strategy though creates concerns around data protection, ability to migrate, and application uptime.
Today, Veeam addresses some of these concerns, but we are about to set the market for true multi-cloud data management come v12! Veeam's next product release provides the ability to copy data from one cloud provider directly into another, while making it simple to recover and convert from any workload to any workload. All clicks away. No professional services or scripting required or needed.
For those who need more than just my word, let's dig into how this will work come v12. Let's create a scenario:
There are AWS EC2 instances that need protecting into S3 over EBS snapshots to keep costs minimal
In addition, the business needs a second copy offsite to either GCP or Azure out of concerns for uptime and vendor lock-in
Lastly, the solution needs to prove it can restore/convert the original AWS EC2 instance into a running Azure IaaS and GCE VM
Below is a high level illustration of what we are about to accomplish. This scenario would work for any permutation of the three major cloud providers.
First, let's start by protecting AWS EC2 instances. I'll spare you the details of showing each step to a policy, but you can find more information here if interested. This policy will backup our EC2 instances to an AWS S3 bucket. The main advantage of this solution over cloud native are the granular recovery options and cost. S3 is $.02 per GB list price whereas AWS Backup EBS snapshots cost $.05 per GB list price.
Second, add the AWS S3 bucket to your main Veeam server as an external repository. This will import all your EC2 backups.
Third, add an Azure storage account and Google Cloud Storage for our secondary offsite backup copies.
Fourth, create backup copy jobs (offsite backups) of the EC2 backups to Azure and GCP.
Fifth, right click on your backup copy job to see all the restore options available. As you can see, VMs in all three major cloud providers can be instantly recovered in VMware as well, but let's not lose focus. Let's restore this VM that was originally an EC2 instance to an Azure VM.
Once you go through the steps of selecting VNet, resource group, instance type, etc, you will see the below high-level logs. Veeam performs the conversion process and then restores the EC2 instance as a running Azure VM.
For the grand finale, we can confirm that the Azure VM is up and running. It is the same exact steps for GCP and for any permutation when going from one cloud to another cloud.
Wow! In just five steps Veeam copied and recovered data from one cloud to another. All within a few clicks. Veeam continues to deliver capabilities based on customer needs, and this is yet another example of that. Leveraging multiple clouds affords companies the flexibility and savings necessary to maintain agile operations. Veeam takes another step forward in making multi-cloud data protection and management truly possible for enterprises.