Backup software provider Veeam has added Cloud Tier, which provides storage tiering to public and private clouds in an update to its Availability Suite data protection environment.

The move – which comes as part of its 9.5 update 4 enhancement – allows customers to migrate data from Veeam backups to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud or any S3-compatible object storage environment, including on-premise private clouds.

Data is extracted from local Veeam backups in VBK format and tiered to AWS Buckets, Azure Blobs or other S3-compatible storage. Users still get to access the data via stubs that are held locally.

Policies can be set by the customer in which data is tiered off to a cloud target according to age of data.

Meanwhile, the company has added Veeam Availability for AWS, which adds the consolidated repository of Cloud Tier to its N2WS cloud-native backup service.

N2WS is a market-leading cloud native backup service for AWS that can recover EC2 instances with a single click by use of native Amazon snapshots.

This move allows customers to store data protected by N2WS in a central Veeam repository with data from across multiple clouds if required.

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A data protection and backup strategy has to take account of the expansion of the sphere of IT, from the datacentre to the public cloud to devices and locations at the edge.

The addition of cloud as a tier mirrors trends across multiple product areas in which cloud capability is being added. What is perhaps different here is that this is tiering off of backup data to S3 format storage, with access possible from local stubs retained on-premise.

A key attraction for customers will be the possibility of storing infrequently accessed data in the cloud and that it will be potentially cheaper than the cost of on-premise storage.

But customers will need to seriously consider their likely patterns of usage. That’s because costs will be incurred for egress of data from the public cloud while time to restore full files will also need to be taken into account.