News

Veeam Updates Data Platform and 'Kasten by Veaam' for Kubernetes

• By David Ramel
• 11/08/2023

Veeam, specializing in data protection and ransomware recovery, announced updates to two major offerings during recent tech events, along with a partnership with Sophos.

At its own recent VeeamON Resiliency Summit, the company announced the new Veeam Data Platform 23H2 update, which includes the new Veeam Backup & Replication v12.1 release. The latter serves as the foundation of the company's data platform, now further reducing incident response time thanks to enhanced proactive threat hunting for backups, integration SIEM platforms, YARA rules for ransomware pattern detection and guides to help customers implement NIST cybersecurity best practices.

As far as other enhancements to the Veeam Data Platform 23H2, new cyber security features include:

• Detect and identify cyberthreats: AI-powered and built-in Malware Detection performs low-impact inline entropy and file extension analysis during backup for immediate detection. Let your SIEM tool report infections directly into Veeam Incident API, which marks existing restore points as infected or triggers out-of-band backups in response.
• Respond and recover faster from ransomware: Perform point-in-time recovery to the moment before infection with I/O Anomaly Visualizer, which ensures the lowest possible data loss thanks to Veeam's continuous data protection (CDP). Avoid reinfection with YARA content analysis and automate clean recovery by using malware-free restore points.
• Secure and compliant protection for data: Highlight threats, identify risks and measure the security score of your environment in the new Veeam Threat Center; Ensure recovery success with automated scans with the Security & Compliance Analyzer; Prevent accidental or malicious deletion or encryption of backups by employing expanded immutability support. This includes 'four-eyes' backup protection, and immutable backups.

The update will be released later this year.

The company also announced a new Veeam Cyber Secure Program, which combines its purpose-built technology with a team of experts to help customers protect and recover from ransomware. Slated to debut early next year, it includes incident recovery services like advanced onboarding, design and implementation assistance and quarterly health checks.

Also at the summit, Veeam announced a partnership with Sophos to fight ransomware, the first partnership of Veeam's new cyber alliance group. The company said it adds human-led threat detection and response to Veeam's backup and recovery solution to provide a comprehensive cybersecurity protection and recovery offering.

Here's how the companies will work together: When the Veeam Data Platform identifies a threat, Veeam sends an alert to Sophos MDR, whose 24/7 security team rapidly neutralizes complex attacks, including ransomware and network breaches. The security operations team can determine if an attack is occurring and take immediate actions to disrupt, contain and fully eliminate the attacker.

The integrated Veeam Data Platform/Sophos MDR offering is expected to be available later this year.

Meanwhile, just yesterday (Nov. 7), Kasten by Veeam, for Kubernetes data protection, announced the release of the K10 V6.5 platform for Kubernetes during another event, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America.

"As part of the new cloud native security innovations in Kasten K10 V6.5, organizations now have access to ransomware protection advances that allow for integrations with SIEM (Datadog) to proactively detect security attacks along with an extended audit log backend that enables the ability to capture Kasten-related activity in a Kubernetes-native environment," the company said.

Here's a list of new cloud native security innovations in Kasten K10 V6.:

• Ransomware protection advances: Integrations with SIEM (Datadog) proactively detects security attacks. Also, an extended audit log backend enables the ability to capture Kasten-related activity in a Kubernetes-native environment.
• Hardened federal container registry: Support for Iron Bank, Platform One's source for hardened and approved containers, ensures application and data security against a variety of threat factors and that the organization can comply with regulatory and legal fiats.
• Software bill of materials for trusted software supply chain: Establishes the integrity and origin of software releases, ensuring enterprises can run their software applications safe in the knowledge they are genuine and secure.

New enterprise-scale capabilities, meanwhile, include:

• Large-scale multi-cluster operations: Multi-cluster dashboard gives administrators a centralized view and control over their Kubernetes data protection environment. It provides visibility into license usage and status across all clusters, allowing administrators to easily create, edit, delete, or clone backup policies and profiles across multiple clusters from a single interface.
• Multi-app restore: Simplifies and speeds up bulk restore operations by enabling users to select multiple applications from the dashboard and restore them to the same or a different cluster with just a few clicks.
• VMs on Kubernetes with OpenShift virtualization: Enterprises can leverage Kubernetes to manage their VM workloads alongside their container workloads, using tools such as RedHat OpenShift Virtualization.
• Kubernetes backup and restore efficiency: Support for Change Block Tracking (CBT) for Amazon EBS volumes allows for faster and more efficient incremental backups. Added support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes extends freedom of choice across various Kubernetes distributions, deployment models, and storage implementations.

General availability of the new Kasten K10 V6.5 is expected later this year.