The two most common business level objectives for any IT organization these days are ransomware protection and reducing cloud spend. Recently, I spoke to an organization that's reduced their cloud spend by nearly $2 million since switching to Veeam at the end of 2022. The goal of this post is to help other companies reap those same benefits.
Many cloud native backup solutions and vendors in the backup industry take a snapshot instead of a backup when protecting cloud native workloads. Similar to on-prem workloads, a snapshot is naturally much more expensive to retain than a backup. For the big three cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) a snapshot is about $.05/GB per month, whereas storing data in object storage is roughly $.02/GB per month. Might just sound like pennies but it adds up quickly. For example, 100 TBs of snapshot data would cost the business $60,000 a year, whereas that data stored in object storage would be $24,000 a year.
How Veeam helps:
Veeam's Cloud Protection Groups protect cloud native (AWS, Azure and GCP) workloads directly to their cloud native object storage (S3, Blob and GCS) without any snapshot or additional compute to move the data. No additional compute is key to the overall total cost of ownership in a cloud protection solution as many other options in the industry will need proxies or media agents to move data to object storage. These compute costs can become costly over time.
Protection Groups is a concept within Veeam for many years. They are a way to categorize and organize workloads, whether they be physical machines, databases or cloud machines. Protection Groups centrally manage endpoints for all workloads via an agent that also acts as a data mover eliminating any additional compute costs for backups.
Quick How-To:
Simply enter in the credentials to your AWS, Azure or GCP account/subscription/project and choose the region of the machines to protect.
Select machines individually for the masochists out there or simply insert a tag to catch-all the workloads to protect.
A role with the following permissions needs to be attached to each instance you want to protect in the case of AWS. Veeam automagically can create and assign those roles which makes life a lot easier for organizations with hundreds or thousands of workloads to protect.
Below is a high-level architecture of how this looks. One of the core differentiators aside from cost savings, is the ability to restore any workload anywhere. Doesn't matter if it is an on-prem physical or virtual machine to AWS, Azure or GCP. An AWS EC2 back on-prem or to another cloud. Any permutation for cross workload restore is supported in just a few clicks. Veeam does the v2v conversion under the covers.
Right-click on the machine you want to restore/move and start restoring back to original location or to a different one.
In summary, there is no other backup solution on the market that can save companies thousands if not millions in yearly cloud spend, while also being easy to implement and manage. IT admins can be heroes to their management by proposing cost saving solutions especially in the current economic climate. Hope this helps!