Introducing Backup Exec 21.4 – Enhanced Ransomware Resiliency and More

We are excited to announce the availability of Veritas Backup Exec 21.4 with enhanced Ransomware protection capabilities, performance improvements, and additional support for cloud storage regions. With this release, we continue to deliver the best product for organizations to manage their data protection strategy.

Ransomware attacks happen every few seconds right now. In June alone of 2021, studies have shown somewhere over 70 million ransomware attacks globally. High-profile attacks on infrastructure, healthcare, and distribution continue to gain the spotlight of the public eye among news articles and discussions.

Disruptions to supply, outages, and massive financial losses only embolden attackers who will continue to exploit all vulnerabilities they are able to find. You don’t have to be in one of the sectors mentioned above to find yourself vulnerable to a ransomware attack.

When it comes to ransomware protection, Backup Exec has a history of Ransomware Resiliency and with the release of version 21.4, we have added support for Write Once, Read Many (WORM) immutable backup, supporting the technologies of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and DataDomain.

Enhanced Ransomware Protection

WORM data archiving is an essential tool in protecting an organization's valued information assets against ransomware attacks. By preventing the alteration of data, malware is unable to encrypt the data and lock the victim out, which means data can be restored by a simple recovery process.

Specifically, in this release of Backup Exec, we now support AWS S3 Object Lock and Dell DataDomain OpenStorage Technology Object Lock enabling users to create WORM-enabled backup sets with these technologies.

Performance Improvements

We are always looking for ways to improve the simplicity of management and performance of our product. Our pitch is that data protection should be simple, secure, and unified. To that end, users should expect to see in this release, performance enhancements related to VMware backups and backups to deduplication jobs.

Backups of VMware virtual machines will now run faster and similarly, the mount time of media during backup to a deduplication storage folder will now perform faster.

New Supported Cloud Regions

Continuing to expand our cloud deduplication capabilities, we have expanded the list of cloud regions in which we support to include the additions of these regions:

• Google Cloud
  • Delhi
  • Melbourne
  • Toronto
• Microsoft Azure
  • East Asia (Hongkong)
  • Korea-Central (Seoul)
  • Norway East (Oslo)
  • Switzerland North (Zurich)
  • UAE North (Dubai)
  • US West3 (Arizona)

For more information on what’s new with Backup Exec, learn more here. Backup Exec has a rapid development cycle that keeps pace with the changing data landscape. Stay tuned for more to come as we continue to develop a best-in-class data protection offering.