This article is based on reporting originally published by CRN Australia ahead of and during the VeeamON 2020 virtual conference (June 17–18, 2020).
Veeam Puts Kubernetes and Cloud-Native Backup in the Spotlight
Data protection and management vendor Veeam used its VeeamON 2020 virtual conference—held June 17–18, 2020, as an online event due to the COVID-19 pandemic—to lay out its strategy for Kubernetes container backup and cloud-native data protection on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
The announcements came at a time when enterprise adoption of containers was accelerating and customers were beginning to ask hard questions about how to protect workloads running in Kubernetes environments—a gap that only a handful of vendors had seriously addressed.
The Kasten Partnership and the Kubernetes Opportunity
In the weeks before VeeamON 2020, Veeam announced a partnership with Kasten, a Kubernetes-native backup specialist headquartered in Los Altos, California. The partnership signalled Veeam’s intent to move beyond traditional VM and file-based workloads and tackle stateful containerised applications.
Channel partners took notice. Manny Punzo, Director of Data Protection and Management at Technologent—an Irvine, California-based solution provider and Veeam channel partner—described the wider market context:
“There are only a handful of niche data protection players talking Kubernetes. Not many of the major players are really talking about it except for maybe Dell Technologies and Commvault. I’ll be looking to see what Veeam does. Customers are now talking about containers and how to protect container data.”
Manny Punzo, Director of Data Protection and Management, Technologent
Punzo also wanted clarity on differentiation: “There’s so much competition in this industry. Backup is backup. Disaster recovery is disaster recovery. I’m looking to see how Veeam differentiates itself.”
Veeam Availability Suite v10 and Cloud-Native Capabilities
A central theme at the conference was Veeam Availability Suite v10, released in February 2020. Highlights of the release relevant to cloud-native workloads included:
- Native backup support for cloud-native applications running on AWS and Microsoft Azure
- Backup coverage for Microsoft 365 data
- A roadmap preview covering additional capabilities planned for the second half of 2020 and beyond
Danny Allan, Veeam’s Chief Technology Officer, described the company’s broader data management vision as resting on five core pillars:
- Data protection — backup, recovery, and replication
- Cloud mobility — moving workloads across on-premises and cloud environments
- Data visibility and monitoring — insight into data assets and backup health
- Orchestration — automating recovery workflows end-to-end
- Governance and compliance — meeting regulatory and audit requirements
“All five will be highlighted at the conference. We already have capabilities in all five. But we will also be highlighting additional capabilities that were both introduced in the first half of 2020 and will be introduced in the second half of 2020 and into the future.”
Danny Allan, CTO, Veeam
2020 Data Protection Report: Key Findings
VeeamON 2020 also served as the launch platform for Veeam’s annual data protection report. Jim Kruger, Veeam’s Chief Marketing Officer, shared headline statistics from a survey of 1,500 global enterprise executives (approximately 5% of whom were existing Veeam customers at the time):
- 49% of respondents were already backing up data to public cloud or backup-as-a-service (BaaS) providers at the time of the survey.
- 77% expected to use cloud or BaaS backup within the next two years—split between 34% planning self-managed cloud backups and 43% planning to use managed BaaS offerings.
- The average cost of unplanned downtime was reported at US$68,000 per hour for enterprise organisations.
- Cyberthreats, including ransomware, were cited as the number one data protection challenge facing enterprises.
Conference Scale and Channel Participation
By the opening of the event, VeeamON 2020 had attracted more than 23,000 registered attendees, including approximately 12,000 strategic channel partners and members of the Veeam Cloud and Service Provider (VCSP) programme. The shift to a virtual format following the cancellation of in-person tech events appears to have broadened participation significantly compared with previous years.
Strategic Context: Insight Partners Acquisition and U.S. Headquarters Move
Punzo’s comments about differentiation also touched on a significant corporate development: earlier in 2020, private equity firm Insight Partners acquired Veeam, and the company subsequently relocated its global headquarters from Baar, Switzerland to the United States. The move was widely interpreted as positioning Veeam to deepen relationships with major U.S.-based public cloud hyperscalers and to compete more aggressively in the North American enterprise market.
Why This Matters for DevOps and Platform Teams
For DevOps engineers and platform architects, the key takeaways from Veeam’s VeeamON 2020 announcements are practical:
- Kubernetes backup is no longer optional. As stateful workloads—databases, message queues, persistent volumes—move into Kubernetes, protecting them requires purpose-built tooling. Generic VM backup tools do not understand Kubernetes resource definitions, namespaces, or persistent volume claims.
- Cloud-native backup differs from cloud-hosted backup. Backing up a VM that runs in AWS is different from protecting a cloud-native application composed of managed services (RDS, DynamoDB, S3, Lambda). Veeam was signalling awareness of this distinction.
- Ransomware is a backup architecture concern. The survey finding on cyberthreats reinforces the need for immutable backup targets, air-gapped copies, and tested recovery runbooks—not just scheduled backup jobs.
- BaaS adoption is accelerating. The projected jump from 49% to 77% cloud/BaaS backup adoption in two years reflects the operational overhead of managing on-premises backup infrastructure and the appeal of consumption-based models.