Veeam Availability Orchestrator update aims to democratise DR

Veeam has announced the general availability of new Veeam Availability Orchestrator v2.

The latest version expands its orchestration and automation capabilities to a broader set of applications and virtual machines (VMs), helping organisations address a variety of operational and disaster recovery (DR) and data migration scenarios.

Never have organisations been so dependent on their data and yet DR used to only be achievable by the largest of enterprises or for only the most critical applications.

With the expanded capabilities within Veeam Availability Orchestrator v2, the Veeam Availability Platform brings comprehensive DR, operational recovery and platform migrations to any organisation that is using Veeam's backup and replication capabilities.

The announcement was made during VeeamON 2019, in Miami, Florida.

"Our new version of Veeam Availability Orchestrator eliminates the challenges of manual processes by introducing reliable orchestrated recovery of production VMs, whether they're protected by backups or replicas," says Veeam product strategy vice president Danny Allan.

"This also includes the ability to quickly and efficiently leverage protection data to prove recoverability and compliance, whether standards are imposed internally or by governing regulations like HIPAA, SOX, GDPR and more.

Approximately 80% of businesses experienced an incident during the past two years that required the use of an IT DR plan.

It is imperative that organisations protect, plan and prepare themselves to overcome any outage, as Veeam customer research reveals that downtime of just a single mission-critical application costs an organisation more than $102,000 per hour on average.

The ability to now automatically test, document and reliably recover entire sites, as well as individual workloads from backups in a completely orchestrated way lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO) of DR.

With this new version of Veeam Availability Orchestrator, Veeam has democratised DR by enabling organisations of all sizes to achieve comprehensive and compliant DR for all their applications and data, no matter how they've been protected.

Other new features delivered in the release of Veeam Availability Orchestrator v2 include the ability to:

• More easily prove — and proactively remediate where necessary — service level agreement (SLA) attainment for internal and external compliance regulations and audits with enhanced reporting and compliance capabilities.
• Automatically leverage both backup and replica protection data for use cases beyond recovery verification, such as DevOps, patch and upgrade testing, analytics and more.
• Empower business units, application owners and operations teams with their own secure access to orchestration planning and testing resources through advanced delegation and role-based access control (RBAC).

ESG senior analyst Christophe Bertrand says, "Our research shows that application and data recovery SLAs are top of mind for enterprises on-premises or in the cloud. Overcoming complex recovery orchestration challenges is needed to test recovery processes and their effectiveness, deliver on mission-critical recoveries and lower business risk.

"This new version of Veeam Availability Orchestrator is raising the bar across multiple dimensions, such as automation, reporting, migration capabilities and the ability to truly establish SLA-driven tiered recovery workflows. Recoverability is everything and Veeam is making strides in simplifying the process.