Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365
vs. BaaS Vendors

Veeam: You can choose the deployment that best fits your business needs and change it when needed with ease. You can deploy backup on-premises, in the cloud or as-a-Service with a Veeam Cloud and Service Provider partner (VCSP). 

BaaS vendors: You only have the option to deploy backup-as-a-service (BaaS). 

Veeam: You can store backups wherever you want, whether on-premises — on any hardware — or in the cloud, on any cloud platform of your choice. Maintain data sovereignty with the ability to choose the exact backup location that aligns with your business or compliance needs.

BaaS vendors: You can rarely choose the cloud provider and you must typically store your backups in the BaaS vendor's own cloud account. Half of vendors provide you with 2-3 data location choices per region and the other half have even fewer options.

Veeam: You can preserve your freedom, as Veeam enables you to change your backup infrastructure anytime to adapt to your changing IT strategy (change backup location, hardware type, or cloud).

BaaS vendors: You experience lock-in, as you can rarely change your backup data location or cloud platform after the initial setup is completed.

Veeam: You can gain peace of mind knowing that you do not have to lose your backup data and search/recovery capabilities if you stop your subscription (you can keep your backups for free and use the free edition for recovery).

BaaS vendors: You get locked into the BaaS vendor, as BaaS vendors hardly ever enable you to migrate backups off their cloud.  As a result, you must keep paying the BaaS vendors or you will lose your backup data and recovery capabilities.

Veeam: You have the ability to meet even the most stringent RPO that your critical data requires. Veeam enables you to customize backup schedules, so you can adjust backup frequency to your business needs — down to minutes – for the most business-critical data.

BaaS vendors: You risk not meeting the RPO that your data requires. BaaS vendors rarely let you choose the backup frequency (it’s typically 24 hours, but some vendors offer every 6 hours).

Veeam: Delivers the appropriate level of protection to different data sets according to their business value. This is done by setting up multiple backup policies with different backup schedules per Microsoft 365 organization.

BaaS vendors: Lack the ability to deliver the right level of protection to different data sets, as BaaS vendors rarely enable you to set up more than a single backup schedule per Microsoft 365 organization (all data is backed up using the same schedule resulting in the same RPO).

Veeam: You can copy backups to a secondary independent location to increase your resilience. Veeam can even copy backups across clouds to eliminate cloud dependency.

BaaS vendors: You don’t have the ability to follow the 3-2-1 rule. BaaS vendors do not let you copy backups, but rely on cloud replication. Your data is copied in the same cloud and on the same type of storage.

Microsoft 365 services 
(Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams) and on-premises Exchange and SharePoint 

Veeam:  Protect Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Teams. You can also protect Exchange and SharePoint on-premises and hybrid deployments.

BaaS vendors:  Protect Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Teams. BaaS vendors do not support protection of Exchange and SharePoint on-premises.

Native Microsoft Teams data protection

(Leveraging Microsoft APIs)

Veeam: Veeam’s fully native support for Microsoft Teams allows for easy backup and effortless recovery directly back to Teams. 

BaaS vendors: Half of BaaS vendors do not natively support Teams. You may be able to back up Teams data via sources (Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive), but you cannot recover data back to Teams.

Veeam: Quickly and effortlessly find specific items buried in large sets of backup data with the ability to search across all users or all sites at once.

BaaS vendors: Finding specific items in large backup data sets takes time and effort. BaaS vendors typically lack searchability across users (must search within one user at a time).

Veeam: You can quickly find data by narrowing the scope of your search with an extensive list of search filters and the ability to combine  filters.

BaaS vendors: You’d need to manually review search results due to unspecific/imprecise search,  with only  a few basic filters available. You’re also not typically able to combine search filters to narrow the search scope.

Veeam: Recover any data, full Microsoft 365 organization, user, folder, or file.

BaaS vendors: Recover any data, full Microsoft 365 organization, user, folder and file. Recovering a full organization takes more work as BaaS vendors typically lack bulk recovery.

Veeam: Full flexibility to recover data to Microsoft 365 any way you want: to original or different user, to original or different user’s folder.

BaaS vendors: Half of vendors are as flexible as Veeam. Half of them are less flexible as they let you recover to the original or different user, but to a recovery folder, not the original or a different folder.

Microsoft: There are native recovery capabilities in Microsoft 365, but they can be cumbersome to utilize. 

Veeam: Allows you to be resilient by recovering to Exchange and SharePoint on-premises in case you cannot restore to Microsoft 365.

BaaS vendors: If you cannot restore to Microsoft 365, you cannot restore the data (aside from a file download/export, which is not scalable).

Veeam: Recover from disaster with minimal downtime and minimal manual effort by utilizing bulk recoveries. These enable you to recover multiple users in a single operation instead of manually recovering users one by one.

BaaS vendors: Inability to minimize downtime after a disaster due to labor-intensive and time-consuming recovery operations. You must typically restore data one user at a time, with typically no ability to recover multiple users in a single restore job.  

Veeam: Delegate restore tasks to end-users, lowering their wait time and admin workload, with a self-service restore portal for users and IT operators that is easy to set up.

BaaS vendors: Several vendors lack a self-service portal. The vendors that do offer one typically do not support as many Microsoft 365 services as Veeam and make it more cumbersome to add users or lack the restore operator role for IT staff.