VMblog: To kick things off, give VMblog readers a quick overview of the company.

Don Stewart:  Data is a company's most precious asset, yet leading on-prem and cloud storage providers often make it difficult for customers to store, organize, move, and access their own data, resulting in over complicated and costly solutions.

That's where Backblaze comes in. Backblaze has been providing astonishingly easy, highly performant, and cost effective cloud storage since 2007. 

At one-fifth the cost of other leading providers like Amazon and Microsoft Azure-yet with all the enterprise-grade security, availability, and performance one would expect-Backblaze continues to be a leading provider of public cloud storage for thousands of Veeam users worldwide.

Today, Backblaze currently manages over three exabytes of data for more than 500,000 customers in over 175 countries.

It's hot storage at cold storage prices. Astonishingly easy.

VMblog: What will VeeamON attendees be most interested to know about your company/technology? Why will they want to add you to their MUST SEE list at the show?

Stewart:  In addition to all the cool SWAG, giveaways, and our entertaining staff, attendees won't want to miss swinging by our booth (P6, near the front entrance) to learn about our easy approach to modern data protection in the cloud, how we do it at a fraction of the cost of other vendors, and why our customers love us!

No hidden fees, no minimum retention periods, no upcharge for Object Lock-no post purchase regret. Just easy and affordable cloud storage.

For the Veeam Partner community, you'll want to come to learn about our Powered by Backblaze offering, a way for Veeam partners to be able to add affordable, secure, and easy-to-use cloud storage to their line card which can be private labeled for their customers. No need for costly hardware or data center infrastructure investments.

Through our Powered by Backblaze solution, Veeam partners not only can quickly and easily deliver a complete turnkey backup as a service solution to clients, they can do it profitably.

VMblog: Diving into your company's technology, can you give readers a few examples of how your offerings are unique? What differentiates your technology from others in the market? What unique benefit can Veeam users expect by integrating your solution?

Stewart:  Backblaze has been part of the cloud storage backup landscape since 2007 and went public in 2021. 

B2 Cloud Storage, our open cloud object storage product, is differentiated by our ease of use, affordability, premium customer support, and our proven track record of performant and dependable service.

Key to our longevity and success is that Backblaze B2 has straightforward, transparent pricing-no minimum retention penalties, no egress charges for up to 3x the data stored (and egress is completely free to most compute and CDN partners), premium support, and no delays in accessing your data when and where you need it.

Seamless Integration: Getting started is a breeze. In a couple of minutes you can make Backblaze B2 your cloud storage target to back up and/or archive for your Veeam data.

Secure: Security is paramount. We include 2FA, server-side encryption, are SOC 2, type 2 certified with data centers in the U.S. and EU, and support major compliance standards. We also do not charge for Object Lock which enables immutability and data resiliency.

As most Veeam users know, immutability provides incredible ransomware protection, so that your data cannot be deleted, encrypted, or modified. This also allows Veeam users to configure their data access rules to align with their governance and compliance policies.

And, always hot cloud storage means that your data is readily available, backed by 99.9% uptime SLAs.

VMblog: Can you tell us a bit about your partnership with Veeam? How do your technologies integrate and complement Veeam solutions to offer additional value to Veeam users? Or how does your technology enhance the Veeam experience?

Stewart:  We have been a Veeam partner for many many years. Veeam continues to be a strategic alliance partner for Backblaze with thousands of Veeam customers all over the world using Backblaze as their S3 compatible cloud storage destination of choice.

As a Veeam Ready-Object with Immutability certified partner, customers can send their backups to Backblaze B2 as their primary repository (using the direct-to-object feature) or as their secondary data storage repository.

VMblog: What are some of the big challenges that you believe VeeamON attendees are facing in 2024? And how does your company help solve them?

Stewart:  The theme of the conference is Radical Resilience for a reason-the need for data protection and resiliency continues to be more and more important for everyone. 

We all know that it's no longer a matter of if, but when, a security incident will threaten business operations. 

The need to be able to plan for any and all incidents is a key challenge-whether those incidents are coming from external or internal threats.

This means making sure that, before you need to respond to any incident, you have to have baked data resiliency into your backup and recovery plans and conduct continuous testing.

This is the main topic of our Wednesday Breakout Session "Mastering Data Backup with Five Strategies for Resilience and Recovery."

VMblog: Is your company involved with any breakout sessions at the show? If so, can you tell us about it?

Stewart:  During our Wednesday Breakout Session at 2:30 p.m., we will be covering the five strategies that will help attendees avoid mistakes that could be the difference between a successful recovery and a horrible experience.

Backblaze B2 not only helps customers protect their data with our Object Lock and other enterprise-grade security features, but we also provide them with the most trusted and reliable cloud storage offering-meaning customers can restore their data immediately when and where needed, with no cold storage delays or costly and unexpected egress fees.

And, with our continuing partnership with Cloud IBR, Backblaze and Veeam users are able to have a fully-managed, automated on-demand backup recovery as a service (BRaaS) platform at their fingertips.

VMblog: Attendees are ready to once again throw some amazing tchotchke into their swag bags. Are you giving away anything special at this event?

Stewart:  We've got a lot of fun things lined up at this year's VeeamOn and as a reminder, we will be located in booth P6:

First, back by popular demand, we are proud to announce that, in partnership with our co-sponsor PhoenixNap, we will be hosting our 2nd Annual Pub Crawl on Tuesday evening. Spots are limited so make sure to register.

Our inaugural event in Miami was so successful and so much fun, so we are thrilled to do it again and to make it a staple networking event for many VeeamOns to come. Last year we had over 80 people attend and we are looking forward to beating that number this year.

Second, in the booth, attendees will be able to speak to all of our representatives about why we are seeing significant growth in our Veeam customer business and to learn about how the combination of Veeam and Backblaze is bringing real value, robust data protection, and super resilience for our joint customers. 

And as mentioned earlier, Veeam partners should stop by to learn how our Powered by Backblaze solution could be used to drive more client value and profits.

Other activities to engage with Backblaze include:

• Attend our Partner theater presentation on Wednesday @ 12:10 p.m. and hear from Tom May, a Veeam Vanguard, on the topic of "Maximizing Veeam: What to Do Next."
• Earn one of our popular bottles of Backblaze hot sauce.
• Take your professional headshot and earn a chance to win a Photo Printer Mini.
• Enter the Data Freeze Out contest-first 100 guesses receive a gift.

Also, snag one of our Backblaze t-shirts, pick up some other blazing hot swag, and chat with Backblaze experts.

VMblog: What key takeaway do you want Veeam users and attendees to remember after visiting your booth?

Stewart:  Needless to say, we are excited about this year's VeeamOn, which promises to be bigger and better than ever. I invite you and all the attendees to stop by our booth (that is booth P6) to learn more about Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage and explore if we might be able to help you improve the resiliency and security of your Veeam backed up data.