Backup is the only thing you buy where the product is never used until the worst day you have. The licence renews on schedule, the dashboard stays green, and the one number that matters - how long it takes to get the business back - has usually never been measured.
Veeam's licensing moved from perpetual per-socket to a per-workload subscription. In practice that changes the shape of the cost entirely: instead of paying for the hosts you own, you pay for every workload you protect, every year, and the figure climbs each time someone spins up another VM. Consolidating onto fewer, larger hosts - the thing you were told to do - no longer reduces it.
The feature tiers do the rest. The capability you want has a habit of sitting one tier above the one you bought, and the annual conversation is about which tier you are on rather than whether your data comes back.
None of this makes Veeam a bad product. It is a genuinely excellent one, and further down this page we say plainly where it is still the right answer. But it is a subscription that grows with your success, sold on an outcome nobody in the building has verified.
Ask around your business: when did we last restore something, and how long did it take? In most small and mid-sized companies the honest answer is either "when something broke" or "I am not sure we ever have."
This is the part that costs money in an emergency, and it has almost nothing to do with which backup product you bought. Jobs report success while silently skipping a database that was locked. Retention is shorter than the time it takes to notice a problem. The backup server itself is joined to the domain that just got encrypted. The one person who knew the restore procedure has left. Everything looks fine, right up until it is the only thing that matters.
The standard people reach for is 3-2-1: three copies, on two kinds of media, one of them offsite. The version worth holding yourself to adds two more digits - one copy immutable or offline, and zero errors after verification. That last digit is the one almost nobody can evidence, and it is the only one that describes an outcome rather than an arrangement.
We do not start from the assumption that you should rip Veeam out. A review lands in one of three places, and two of them involve keeping it.
You are paying for workloads that no longer exist, or protecting things at a tier they never needed. The fix is a corrected licence count at renewal, and you carry on with the product you already know. We have no incentive to pretend otherwise.
Your virtualization platform already includes capable backup, and some of your estate could be protected there instead - leaving Veeam licensed only for what genuinely needs it, such as Microsoft 365 or complex application restores. The bill drops without losing a capability.
The backups are running and would not have brought you back. A gap in coverage, retention that is too short, no immutable copy, or a restore path nobody has walked. This is the outcome that actually matters, and the one a renewal conversation never surfaces.
This is not a table designed to make one column win. Veeam is ahead in several rows below and we have marked them plainly - the point is that most businesses are buying every row when they only need some of them.
| Veeam subscription | Platform-integrated backup | How we usually combine them | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licensing | Per workload, per year. Grows with the estate. | Included with the virtualization platform. No per-VM count. | Bulk of the estate on the included platform; Veeam kept where it earns its keep. |
| Virtual machine backup | Excellent, mature, broad hypervisor support. | Excellent on its own platform - incremental, deduplicating, verified. | Platform-integrated for the VMs, because it is already paid for. |
| Granular app restores SQL, Exchange, AD item-level | Ahead. Deep application-aware item-level recovery. | Image and file level. Not item-level inside applications. | If you need item-level Exchange or SQL recovery, this is a reason to keep Veeam. |
| Microsoft 365 | Ahead. A real, mature product for it. | Out of scope - it does not cover SaaS. | Keep a dedicated M365 backup. This gap is more common and more serious than people expect. |
| Mixed and legacy estates | Ahead. Physical, cloud, NAS, many hypervisors. | Strongest on the platform it belongs to. | Mixed estates are exactly where Veeam is worth paying for. |
| Immutability | Supported, depending on tier and repository. | Supported, with offline and append-only options. | At least one copy immutable or offline, with separate credentials, whichever product writes it. |
| Verified restores | Available - and frequently not switched on. | Verification available and scheduled. | Non-negotiable either way. We report restores, not job status. |
| Support | Vendor, contingent on an active subscription. | Community, or a vendor subscription if you want one. | Us, by name, across whichever products you end up running. |
| If you stop paying | Entitlement to updates and support ends. | It keeps running. Your backups stay readable. | Whatever the mix, you keep the data and the documented procedure. |
The order is deliberate. We establish whether you can currently recover before discussing what anything costs, because a cheaper backup that does not restore is not a saving.
What you are entitled to, what you are consuming, what tier you are on, and when it renews. This alone regularly finds workloads being paid for that were decommissioned long ago.
Not what the jobs are named - what data they contain. This is where the gaps surface: Microsoft 365, endpoints, a SaaS application holding real records, network device configurations, and the one server somebody excluded temporarily in 2023.
Whether your backups could survive the event they exist for. Shared credentials with production, a repository reachable from an encrypted domain, or no offline copy at all are all common - and all fatal at exactly the wrong moment.
An actual server or database, recovered into an isolated environment, with a stopwatch on it. You get a recovery time you can quote rather than estimate. This is the step most reviews skip and the only one that proves anything.
You get the findings in writing - including, where it applies, that your licensing is right and your restores work. Any recommendation comes after the evidence, not instead of it.
Missing coverage and missing immutability get addressed before anyone touches a renewal. Saving money on a backup that would not have recovered you is the wrong order of operations.
If part of the estate moves to platform-integrated backup, the existing product stays licensed and running in parallel until the new one has performed a successful, timed restore of real data. We do not let anyone drop a subscription on the strength of a green dashboard.
Restores tested on a schedule, results reported to you, retention and immutability monitored, and the recovery procedure written down where someone other than one person can follow it.
No. We are telling you to know what you are paying for and to prove it works. Plenty of our reviews end with "your licensing is about right, switch on verification, and fix the Microsoft 365 gap." If you have a mixed estate, or you need item-level Exchange and SQL recovery, Veeam is very likely the correct tool and we will say so in writing.
The risk in backup is almost never the software - it is coverage, retention, immutability and whether anyone has tested a restore. Those are configuration and discipline questions, and a poorly run deployment of an expensive product fails exactly as completely as a poorly run free one. What matters is that a named person is accountable for verifying it, which is the part we are actually selling.
Not in the way most people assume. Microsoft operates a shared responsibility model: they keep the service running and protect it from their failures, while your data remains your responsibility. Retention policies, recycle bins and litigation hold are useful but they are not backup - they will not save you from a deletion discovered three months later, a compromised account, or a departed employee's mailbox being purged. This is one of the most common serious gaps we find.
The single most important control is a copy the attacker cannot reach or alter - immutable or genuinely offline, with credentials that are not your production credentials. Everything else is secondary. We check that first, because a complete, well-retained backup that was encrypted alongside production has protected nobody.
Restores are performed into an isolated environment with no route back to live systems. Nothing is overwritten and nothing is switched over. The output is a recovered system you can inspect and a measured recovery time.
Tell us the requirement and we will design retention to meet it and document the evidence, rather than retaining everything forever because nobody was sure. Over-retention is itself a cost and, increasingly, a liability.
A fixed-price engagement sized to your estate. If we find nothing wrong you get a short written report saying so, which is a legitimate outcome and a genuinely useful document to hand an insurer, an auditor, or a board. We would rather be the people who told you it was fine than the people who sold you something you did not need.
You do - the data, the repositories and the written recovery procedure. Backup is the last place anyone should accept a dependency on a supplier, and that includes us.
Hypervisor licensing. Firewall subscriptions. Backup seat counts. Per-endpoint tooling. Per-extension telephony. Individually they are line items - together they are a business you do not control, renewing on somebody else's schedule at somebody else's price.
We replace them with platforms you own, standardized and documented. Fewer renewals, more capability, and the freedom to change course whenever you choose.
Starting with whether you can currently recover.
Tell us what you are backing up, what you are licensed for, and when the renewal lands. We will tell you where the real gaps are, what the licensing should be, and - if it is the right answer - that you should stay exactly as you are.
We do not share your details, and we will not add you to a drip campaign.