afi.ai vs. Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365

Great for archiving of deleted SharePoint online sites and off-boarded Microsoft 365 users; unlimited number of on-demand backup runs that can be triggered in the application by system administrators.

Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 is well suited for medium-size companies who have a significant amount of free storage and want to keep their own copies for retention/legal reasons. It is also a great way to back up SharePoint sites in the event of something being lost or incorrectly changed by a user. It is not great for deep visibility into your backups and exact sizing. There is no good way to truly view which items are taking up storage without digging into PowerShell commands.

Incentivized

• Archiving of deleted Microsoft 365 users.
• Backup of SharePoint lists and OneNote books.
• Fast offline export of a mailbox and SharePoint items.

• My CFO seemed to have lost a whole year of important emails. I simply restored them to his mailbox in a matter of minutes.
• An employee left the company but an issue came up with a quote this person sent out. I could search his mailbox and got the quote as well as all communications from that customer.
• It is nice to be able to search emails in various mailboxes without disturbing the user.
• It is also nice to go back in time. Say they deleted those emails last month I can go back years if needed.

Incentivized

• It would be handy to have SharePoint file versions comparisons in the UI
• Email alerts on settings changes would be good to have too.

• Backing Up "Public Folders" is quite a hassle, but this is not the "fault" of Veeam but the way Microsoft exposes this data.
• No option to integrate the product into their other solution, it would be great to access M365 backup in the Backup & Replication application.

Incentivized

We will continue to renew the service for as long as we continue to use MS 365, unless Microsoft will release native Office 365 backup that provides all necessary features, including multi-geo admin roles, long-term affordable archiving storage tier, auto-conversion of email formats (MBOX, EML etc), point-in-time preview of previous file versions.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 just works so well and is so easy to use. I researched multiple options for Office 365 backup and none seemed to be as easy to setup and use as Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 and the pricing was very comfortable to us. I can't imagine any reason why we would change away from Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365.

Incentivized

The UI is very intuitive and requires almost zero training to use. Our end users were able to use it with after just reading a simple one-pager.

Veeam Data Cloud has an easy and user-friendly interface, easy integration with Microsoft 365 cloud, strong backup and recovery functionality, and robust security features. It is one of the few solutions that can export to .pst files and also has a very simple opt-out because the data is stored on the Microsoft cloud.

Incentivized

I have yet to need it during any of their scheduled maintenance windows. It's always online.

Incentivized

We have a lot of data, and pulling backups out of the store sometimes takes a bit of time - but this is within acceptable tolerances. I don't expect restores to be instantaneous, and I can't quantify if the speed is software or data repository.

Incentivized

We needed to contact them three times over the course of two years, and it was very good. Very fast response, and the people are super technical and to the point.

Support for all Veeam products is pretty good. While documentation sometimes is written for someone who's already an expert on the platform, their support portal is easy enough to use, and they are very responsive once a support need is documented. I have never had a problem with Veeam that could not be resolved in fairly short order.

Incentivized

Would have marked a 10 but the storage in AWS was very complicated. Would be nice to have more help/guidance connecting to external storage.

Incentivized

afi is next generation system, with our previous vendor we had to wait for a long time to access data, sometimes up to 24h.The reason for that was our scale according to the support team. ( 50TB +) With afi it takes a few seconds. The UI is super simple and easy to use, no training required for end-users to work with the system. afi support is super responsive and very helpful.

My familiarity with Veeam Data Cloud specifically is what drew me to the product. They both seem equally capable, but when you know a product you generally tend to go that direction. I believe the other provider could back up our environment, but I am not familiar with it and as I have stated when you need to get up and going quick it is best to be very familiar with the product you are utilizing.

Incentivized

I have had no issues scaling this software as my organisation or data estate has grown. It always does exaclty what it says on the box.

Incentivized

• It's hard to assess ROI here, however we were able to recover very important documents and full user accounts for executive team during the audit. It helped in a big way.
• Self-Service is a life saver for IT helpdesk team, saved a lot of human hours.

• The only real impact is from a compliance standpoint. Our company is expected at a regulatory level to be protecting our data and even though the tenant has little traffic there could still be some regulated data in there. We have to be able to tell an auditor that it's being backed up by an enterprise grade solution, and that's what VDC was intended for.

Incentivized