Veritas Partners with Microsoft to Enhance Cyber Resiliency for Microsoft 365 Backup Storage

Veritas is building on our existing relationship with Microsoft to deliver a new offering that will enhance the forthcoming Microsoft 365 Backup Storage. 

Organizations around the world continue to adopt software as a service (SaaS) solutions, such as Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Slack and Box, at an accelerated pace. Three main reasons customers love SaaS are:

• SaaS applications enable remote teams to collaborate from anywhere
• SaaS applications are less expensive upfront than self-managed software
• SaaS applications are easier to deploy and maintain at scale

As modern ways of working have shifted toward SaaS, SaaS applications have become a primary target for cyber-attacks such as ransomware, which present major challenges to the teams responsible for security, SaaS line-of-business services, and, of course, IT operations.

Every Customer is a Target for Ransomware Attacks

Even the world’s largest casinos are not immune from ransomware attacks. Some very public attacks occurred this year in Las Vegas, causing over $100M of revenue loss and disrupting critical business operations. After a ransomware event this summer, one of the world’s leading casinos and resorts turned to Veritas and Microsoft for help.

Veritas is one of the world’s-leaders in secure multi-cloud data management, and we provide a cyber resilience solution, together with Microsoft, to help this casino be cyber resilient, and recover fast and securely from ransomware and cyber threats.

Veritas Alta with Microsoft provided a cyber-resilience solution to defend all possible data estates of cloud, SaaS and enterprise apps, integrating with Microsoft Sentinel, Defender, and a robust cyber security ecosystem of tools and partners. Veritas provided an Isolated Recovery Environment (or IRE), with an air-gapped immutable recovery zone, plus key data observability and compliance insights.

Together, we were able to help the casino defend their nearly $10 billion in revenue, and keep all their resorts online globally, including securing their Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams environments.

Don’t Forget, You Are Responsible for Your SaaS Data, Not the SaaS Application Vendor

That’s why Veritas is collaborating with Microsoft to ensure SaaS data is protected. Microsoft 365 Backup Storage provides backup and restore for Microsoft 365 data, including OneDrive, , SharePoint, and Exchange. Microsoft 365 Backup Storage point in time recovery capabilities. When complemented by solutions from the Veritas Alta secure cloud data management platform, Veritas provides an enterprise-grade solution to allow you to securely protect data across your Microsoft 365 instances and recover faster from cyber threats such as Ransomware. All while helping you address your portions of Microsoft’s shared responsibility model.

With Veritas + Microsoft 365 Backup Customers Will be Able to Achieve the Following Outcomes:

• Reduced risk with advanced security protection 
  • Tightly integrate cyber resilience and recovery from ransomware or data loss
    • Microsoft 365 Backup Storage provides fast bulk restore within agreed upon SLA to protect against external ransomware attacks.
    • Adding Veritas Alta SaaS Protection to Microsoft 365 Backup Storage provides comprehensive protection by adding flexible recovery to your data loss risk. Veritas includes granular restores at file and object level for greater flexibility and protection on more targeted data loss scenarios. 
    • Adding Veritas Alta SaaS Protection to Microsoft 365 Backup Storage also offers greater flexibility when deciding on how to serve your RPO/RTO needs, and matching these with the appropriate level and cost of protection – one size does not fit all – Veritas Alta SaaS Protection + Microsoft 365 Backup Storage is better together and they offer flexibility of protection choice 
  • Meet corporate business continuity, disaster recovery, long-term data retention and governance needs
    • Microsoft 365 Backup Storage offers 1 year retention of your data. By complementing this with Veritas customers can meet longer term data retention and compliance needs.
    • Veritas enables customers to export copies of their data outside of Microsoft 365/Microsoft Azure, to meet their resilience, retention, and compliance requirements. 
• Lower total cost of ownership (TCO)
  • Control cloud costs and lower TCO of Microsoft 365 services
    • Reclaim licenses and storage from employee turnover. Intelligently automate and manage employee turnover data to a centralized and secure cloud while ensuring data immutability and security, with cheap and easy retention and reprovisioning.
    • Veritas end-user portal self-service restore will help save on IT costs.
• Accelerate IT
  • Manage Microsoft 365 data along with other SaaS applications (including Slack and Salesforce), Enterprise Data Center applications (physical or virtual), and private and public clouds all through a single platform. 
  • Empower SecOps, SaaS and ITOps teams to collaborate faster to address advanced search, compliance, and discovery requests.
    • With Veritas you get the ability to perform full-text indexing, legal holds, advanced search, exports, audit tracking, cases/case permissions, and more.
    • Accelerate IT ticket resolution and reduce compliance risk by providing quick, easy, and global search across all protected workloads with Veritas.

We are excited to be partnering with Microsoft to enable customers to perform snapshots and fast recovery of Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange and OneDrive. Together we extend our cyber resiliency capabilities and our joint commitment to ransomware protection and recovery, which we recently restated with the launch of Veritas 360 Defense, where Microsoft was the first partner to have a product achieve Veritas RedLabs validation.”-- Lawrence Wong, Chief Strategy Officer, Veritas

Our customers will enjoy enhanced features from Veritas integration with Microsoft 365 Backup Storage. This advanced platform offers excellent backup experiences for business reliability and assurance," said Jeff Teper, President, Collaboration Apps and Platforms, Microsoft.

The collaboration between Veritas and Microsoft will provide customers with improved data security and data governance for their SaaS environments, where extremely fast RTO and RPO for Microsoft 365 data is now possible. The capabilities of the Veritas Alta platform provide enterprise-wide data protection and management, and this unique stack is very compelling for our joint customers, systems integrators and channel partners. 

Further information regarding our public preview of this new integration, general availability timelines, pricing, and more will follow as details become available.  For information about our existing data protection solutions, including those for Microsoft  365, please visit our website,  watch the demo here Or, contact us now to get started a

For more information about Microsoft 365 backup, visit the Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Backup Storage at Ignite 2023 blog by Microsoft.