VMblog: How excited are you that VeeamON is back as a physical event this year?

Elton Carneiro:  Very excited - so much has changed at Backblaze since the beginning of the pandemic: being certified Veeam Ready - Object with Immutability, offering our Instant Disaster Recovery Solution, protecting Kubernetes data via Kasten. Over the past two years we've welcomed so many new Veeam customers to B2 Cloud Storage, but there's something different about being able to meet them in person, as well as introduce ourselves to those who might not have heard about everything we have cooking.

VMblog: Why should a VeeamON attendee add you to their MUST SEE list?

Carneiro:  Attendees "must" come to our booth because we provide the easiest approach to modern data protection in the cloud, and we do it at a fraction of the price of other vendors. That combination has delivered value for our customers beyond anything they expected at first. And any visitors can meet with our team to discuss their use case and how we can serve it. We also have very cool swag - which, let's face it, sometimes can be a bigger motivator. Whatever reason attendees find to visit us, they'll leave feeling good about the opportunity to protect their data and their budget in one move, and they'll look good after accessorizing with Backblaze t-shirts,
stickers, collapsible bags, and more.

VMblog: Can you give VMblog readers a sneak peek as to what you will be showing off at your booth?

Carneiro:  We've got a lot of fun lined up, but here are three things attendees should not miss:

• Our demo of how to recover data with our on-demand, pay-as-you-go disaster recovery solution - the hook here is that this can be completed in 3 minutes.
• A demo of a cybercriminal attack on production data and backups - this provides you the criminal-eye-view of how immutability protects your data.
• A safe full of prizes. Yes, to underline the theme of security we've got a safe full of gift cards, and we'll be sharing clues to cracking it on Linkedin and Twitter. Should be fun.

I'm personally excited to see how folks do with the safe. I may have to give it a try myself.

VMblog: Talking about your product solutions, can you give readers a few examples of how your offerings are unique? What are your differentiators?

Carneiro:  B2 Cloud Storage is differentiated by its ease of use, affordability, security, and our trusted track record.

Easy:

• Back up and restore transparently and directly from the Veeam console.
• Infinitely scalable retention with no need to provision or manage backup hardware.

Affordable:

• Backblaze is a fraction the price of other cloud storage solutions.
• Importantly: We have NO minimum retention fees (aka Delete Penalties)
• Just Launched: Backblaze B2 Reserve Cloud Storage to align with Veeam customer preferences.
  • Exclusive to the channel, a capacity-based model, offering customers 1, 2, or 3 year SKUs starting at 20TB.
  • Also comes with complimentary Tera level support, waived fees, and subsidized data migration support.

Secure:

• Immutability with Object Lock provides incredible ransomware protection.
• SSE-C, 2FA, HTTPS, and data centers are SSAE-16 / SOC-2 compliant.

Trusted:

• All data readily available, backed by SLA.
• Backblaze has a fifteen year track record and currently manages over 2 exabytes of data storage for more than 500,000 customers.

VMblog: How does your company work with Veeam? And how does your product fit within the Veeam ecosystem?

Carneiro:  Veeam is a strategic alliance partner for Backblaze. We align directly with their commitment to ease-of-use and their mission to help the Veeam customer base modernize their data protection strategy. As a Veeam Ready-Object certified partner, customers can tier backups to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage.

Importantly, Backblaze B2 also supports the Object Lock feature, which Veeam takes advantage of to make customers' backups immutable and therefore protected from ransomware.

VMblog: What do you think we need to do collectively as an ecosystem to strengthen the industry?

Carneiro:  Option 1: Beyond the obvious answer (Modernize Data Protection!), we think education and testing for IT teams is something we should all work to promote. We love to promote backup as a "set and forget" solution, but we should normalize "Set it, forget it, then test it." Every business should test their disaster recovery plan on a regular basis, and educating their team about the plan should be part of that cadence-because we all know when disaster strikes it's difficult to stay calm and avoid making mistakes. This is part of why we made our Instant Disaster Recovery solution a free, radically easy solution: We want it to be so simple and affordable that any customer will be happy to run it through its paces on a regular basis.

VMblog: We expect to hear about big industry topics during the keynotes, but what does your company see taking shape in the coming landscape? What would your keynote topic include?

Carneiro:  We're obviously cloud evangelists, so if we were offering a keynote it would underscore the value of incorporating the cloud into your business right now. It's easy to get mired in all the old arguments about on-prem versus the cloud, but new benefits to a hybrid or full cloud approach appear almost daily: Immutable backups (beyond being a great line of defense) can decrease your cyber insurance bill. You never have to worry about supply chains-that, and so many other hardware headaches are ours to worry about. Finance teams increasingly seek an opex approach and you can unlock a big piece of your balance sheet in that regard. It would be a long keynote - but we'll leave it there for a taste of what we'd have to say.

VMblog: What is it about VeeamON that makes you want to sponsor?

Carneiro:  VeeamON is a fantastic event to showcase our long partnership with Veeam and how it enables us to help Veeam customers to protect, lock, and recover their data in the cloud. Our partnership is as organic as it is strategic in that we're naturally aligned around ease of use and data protection modernization, so it's a no-brainer for us to sponsor an event that brings together our community of data protection advocates with customers and resellers we can help.

VMblog: We've been forced to attend virtual/online events for the past 2+ years.  Attendees are ready to once again throw some amazing tchotchke into their swag bags.  Are you giving away anything special at this event?

Carneiro:  Of course! Everyone knows that coming away with swag is part of what makes being together great, and we will definitely have some blazing hot giveaways for visitors this year. T-shirts, collapsible/foldable bags, stickers and more. We also have a safe onsite with prizes inside. We will be releasing clues through social media to help crack the 4 digit code. Inside the safe will be prizes for attendees. Once the safe has been unlocked, the code will change, and new clues will be released.