Overview

Introduction

A data protection strategy can be implemented through a service provider’s cloud subscription or one that is owned by the customer. During the initial architecture phase of public cloud protection as a service, the service provider should take into account:

• Source data location / account owner - Specify if it’s in the Service Provider subscription or the customer’s subscription.
• Veeam Backup for Public cloud appliance placement - Indicate if it will be in the Service Provider or customer’s subscription.
• Repository and retention - Determine where and how backups should be stored: customer’s Object Storage in the Cloud, Service Provider storage in the Cloud, or offloaded on-premises. With or without immutability. Use Hot, Cold or Archive storage.
• Desired self-service capabilities for tenants - such as access to backup policies, Restore capabilities, and more.

Components

To cover these scenarios, you will need the following components of the solution:

• Veeam Backup and Replication with plugins for Public Cloud

  The Veeam Backup and Replication server is necessary for connecting the Veeam Backup for Public Cloud appliances. This is achieved by utilizing one of the cloud-native plugins within VBR. Once this connection is established, you will be able to manage the cloud appliance from within the VBR server, which can either be a customer-dedicated VBR server or the Service Provider Cloud Connect server.

• Veeam Backup Appliance in Public Cloud

  The Cloud appliance serves as the control plane for safeguarding your cloud-native workloads, which includes managing cloud accounts and permissions, as well as initiating backup and restore functionalities.

• Veeam Service Provider Console and Cloud Connect

  The Veeam Service Provider Console offers monitoring and management capabilities for Veeam Backup & Replication, while also streamlining license management and usage reporting. It is particularly important and recommended to utilize this console with pod-design deployments, taking into account the number of individual VBR installations.

  As mentioned above, this can be deployed in one of two ways: either with a dedicated VBR server per customer or leveraging the Service Provider Cloud Connect server.

Backup Process

Within Veeam Backup for Public Cloud, data is processed from snapshots by worker instances that are automatically provisioned according to your Public Cloud account settings. The protected data will be stored in a Repository, which is the object storage designated for a backup policy. Once data is secured with Veeam Backup for Public Cloud, it becomes manageable through Veeam Backup and Replication, which enables:

• full or partial recoveries from Cloud Storage (S3 bucket, Azure Blob, Google Cloud Storage)
• Backup Copy Job to secondary location
• cross-cloud recovery
• recoveries to on-premises

Note for small-scale infrastructures

If your tenants have a small number of virtual machines to protect, expenses for native snapshots and other backup operations could be significant compared to on-premises backups. To reduce overall costs, you may consider utilizing Veeam Agents to safeguard those workloads by leveraging Veeam Backup and Replication with licenses for Agents instead of utilizing a Public Cloud solution.

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