I read the always excellent Gostev digest today (the Jun 17 - 23 issue) and it had one very interesting piece of information:
No spoilers – but we're actually working on something along the same lines that will not even require tape and is arguably better anyway - but unlike tape, it will not be suitable for everyone. Sorry for leaving you wondering, but I can promise you will be the first to hear details here once we're ready to disclose this new technology later this year.
Could Gostev or anyone from Veeam give some more details about this?
My company is currently looking at entering a long term agreement for Cloud Connect + Insider Protection with dedicated hardware. Great solution for air-gapped data, quick disaster-recovery with the HW moved to our location, but costly. So naturally interested in any new features or solutions regarding this from Veeam.
Hahahah good catch Fuzzer. We are not ready to disclose that just yet, but you will either hear it here first or possibly on a launch event online (like we did for U4).
For now, Cloud Connect + Insider Protection is a very strong solution.
While we have completed the implementation, it needs to pass the acceptance testing to ensure everything works as designed, considering the whole concept relies on a 3rd party storage functionality. And in this particular case, security/penetration testing is a big part of the acceptance testing, because we need to ensure there's absolutely no way to bypass the protection. As I said in my blog post, to be worthwhile it has to provide 100% bulletproof air-gap solution - in other words, it has to at least match the level of protection that offline tapes stored in a safe would provide, for us to be able to confidently recommend that as a replacement for offline tapes. Even if as it stands right now, on paper our approach is expected to provide even better protection - as for example, that local safe can still be cracked (the reason why people ship tapes to Iron Mountain and alike).
I can also tell you that this functionality has been in the works for a while, and we've already been through one major redesign phase, following the discovery of an unexpected storage implementation quirk that enabled a solid attack vector. We were able to work around this particular one, but this resulted in 1 months worth of extra development. And we cannot exclude that we may find another issue that is either impossible to address, or just takes too long to address for us to be able to ship this functionality in the next release.
As such, we will announce this functionality only when we're sure that it does provides the required level of protection and is going to make the next release. But don't get us wrong here - the main reason is that we don't want you making plans around what can potentially turn into "vaporware" that is never released.
I expect we will reach the required confidence level in August.
The feature is backup immutability... official blog post from Veeam is coming soon as a part of v10 launch, and I didn't want to spill the beans early. However, there are some public materials available already.
First, recent VeeamON Virtual had a high level overview in the futures session, you should be able to register and see the recording.
Also, here's much more in-depth session from the recent Tech Field Day.