Veeam Expands Data Resilience with AI Integration, Identity Protection for Microsoft Entra ID -- Virtualization Review

Veeam Expands Data Resilience with AI Integration, Identity Protection for Microsoft Entra ID

By David Ramel
04/22/2025

Veeam Software announced two new offerings during its VeeamOn event aimed at strengthening enterprise data protection through AI and enhanced identity management. Both announcements reflect the company's strategy to reduce complexity for IT teams and improve resilience in cloud environments.

The data resilience and cybersecurity solutions specialist announced a new integration that transforms protected data into a source of AI-driven intelligence. By adopting the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard developed by Anthropic, Veeam will enable AI models to securely interact with data within Veeam repositories. This allows organizations to utilize their backup data for advanced analysis and insights, moving beyond traditional recovery scenarios.

The MCP is an open standard that helps connect AI agents to organizational systems and data repositories. By supporting MCP, Veeam said it becomes the bridge between mission-critical protected data and the growing ecosystem of enterprise AI tools -- from Anthropic's Claude to customer-built large language models (LLMs).

Key capabilities enabled by the MCP integration, according to a news release, include:

AI systems can gain secure access to Veeam-protected data.
Organizations can leverage AI for enhanced decision-making and deeper understanding of their data.
The integration is designed to be seamless, requiring no custom connectors for AI platforms.
Users will be able to employ natural language queries to locate and retrieve relevant documents from their protected data.
This integration aims to streamline compliance and e-discovery workflows.
AI agents can be enriched with specific enterprise context derived from the Veeam-managed data.

"We're not just backing up data anymore -- we're opening it up for intelligence," said Niraj Tolia, CTO at Veeam. "By supporting the Model Context Protocol, customers can now safely connect Veeam-protected data to the AI tools of their choice. Whether it's internal copilots, vector databases, or LLMs, Veeam ensures data is AI-ready, portable, and protected."

Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft Entra ID
The company also introduced Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft Entra ID, a fully managed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) backup solution for protecting identity infrastructure. Microsoft Entra ID, formerly Azure Active Directory, is a foundational component in enterprise access management, and this new service ensures that user accounts, roles, groups, and policies can be backed up and recovered in case of misconfiguration, accidental deletion, or malicious activity. The service enables point-in-time restores and supports granular recovery operations. It also includes role-based access control and detailed audit trails to support compliance and governance requirements. This new offering is part of the Veeam Data Cloud portfolio, which also includes protection for Microsoft 365 and Azure workloads.

Key features of Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft Entra ID as listed by the company include:

Proactive Protection: Enhances visibility and control over changes within Entra ID, ensuring business continuity, security, and compliance.
Effortless Recovery: Allows quick restoration of Entra ID users, groups, attributes, app registrations, logs, related metadata, and more with reliability.
Comprehensive Inclusion: Offers a secure backup service managed by experts, offloading maintenance, updates, and security fixes.

"Protecting Microsoft Entra ID has never been more important," the company quoted Krista Case, research director at The Futurum Group, as saying. "In fact, one in five respondents in Futurum's Cybersecurity Decision Maker IQ research indicated credential compromise/account takeover as a security incident most impacting their organization. Veeam is making resiliency for these environments, including visibility into potentially malicious behavior and automated backup jobs, accessible to a broader range of customers by delivering it in a managed and hosted model with the addition of Entra ID protection to Veeam Data Cloud."

Together, these developments aim to reduce the operational burden on IT teams by improving usability and automating critical recovery functions. The MCP integration reflects a shift toward intelligent, AI-assisted infrastructure management, while the Entra ID solution addresses growing concerns around identity-related security risks and regulatory compliance.

Veeam also published a bevy of posts that cover other VeeamON announcements in its blog:

Introducing the Data Resilience Maturity Model (DRMM): This post introduces the Data Resilience Maturity Model (DRMM), a framework developed by Veeam to help organizations evaluate and strengthen their data resilience strategies. It outlines five maturity levels—from reactive to autonomous—and provides guidance for advancing through them by improving alignment, protection, observability, recovery, and automation. The DRMM is designed to help IT and business leaders benchmark their current capabilities, identify gaps, and implement a structured roadmap toward more resilient, proactive, and intelligent data protection.
Introducing Veeam Data Cloud for Salesforce: This post announces the launch of a purpose-built Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) solution designed to protect critical Salesforce data. It highlights the importance of safeguarding SaaS data that falls outside of Salesforce's native recovery capabilities and outlines the platform's features, including automated backups, flexible recovery options, and a user-friendly interface. The post emphasizes how this solution helps ensure business continuity, meet compliance requirements, and protect against data loss due to user error, integration issues, or malicious actions.
Practical Strategies for Achieving Hybrid Cloud Scalability : This post explores practical strategies for achieving scalability in hybrid cloud environments, focusing on how IT teams can balance flexibility, performance, and cost. It outlines key considerations such as aligning business objectives with infrastructure planning, choosing the right workloads for public versus private clouds, and implementing unified data protection. The post also highlights the role of automation, monitoring, and governance in maintaining operational efficiency as hybrid environments grow, with an emphasis on leveraging Veeam solutions to support scalable and resilient architectures.
Hybrid Cloud Strategy: Best Practices for Secure & Scalable Solutions: This post provides best practices for building a secure and scalable hybrid cloud strategy, emphasizing the importance of flexibility, data protection, and compliance. It discusses key pillars of hybrid cloud success, including workload mobility, visibility across environments, and consistent security policies. The post also explains how Veeam's data protection solutions support these goals by enabling seamless backup, recovery, and orchestration across both on-premises and cloud infrastructure. The guidance aims to help organizations optimize their hybrid deployments while maintaining control and resilience.