What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Veritas Alta Recovery Vault is to have backup for my Office 365 environment.
For my Office 365 environment, I have many scenarios where I use Veritas Alta Recovery Vault. A user left the company, and they need his PST files to be exported and attached to his replacement. Or in case they need to go back for a previous email from three years back, I can put some criteria to research for this specific email and restore it. Or I need to restore some OneDrive for some users, or chat for some meetings. There are many scenarios.
Veritas Alta Recovery Vault has a feature called Cases, so I can build my cases and put some criteria based on time, or sender, or subject. Based on this case, I can create it, run it, and export this specific case.
What is most valuable?
Veritas Alta Recovery Vault offers multiple best features. I can enable immutability to avoid any deletion by mistake or by ransomware attack for our backup. They also have a feature called ad-hoc search, so if I need to search for specific items, whether email or OneDrive or SharePoint site, I have multiple criteria to put whatever I want and search for specific items. I can restore some data to the live environment directly, or I have tools that I can customize and export something, whether PST or EML files or OneDrive files. They have many features and some analysis in case I need to see the increase of backup size and prepare for the renewal, or if I need to delete some backup to reduce the storage because I don't need to exceed my license.
Veritas Alta Recovery Vault has positively impacted my organization because in case some users left, I don't care if they delete their old archive files because I have backup for their emails or OneDrive, even SharePoint. If an administrator deletes the site by mistake, I can recover it. This takes a lot of headache off from the user perspective. Any data lost or removed by the users can be restored. If management asks for any data, it is available, so we are not relying on the data available in the user PCs.
I have seen many specific outcomes since using Veritas Alta Recovery Vault. The major benefit for us is that many users left, and the business did not tell us that their emails or OneDrive or SharePoint data or Teams is important. They just wake up after six months or one year, and suddenly they ask for their emails. With Veritas Alta Recovery Vault, we have good retention, and everything is saved. By enabling immutability, we can respond to the business needs without any issues, complying with the regulations. Even the headache is less; based on the staff number, we have a small support staff number, so we save a lot of support and maintenance time. While I do not have exact KPIs or metrics numbers, it saves almost 30% of our incidents and time.
What needs improvement?
I think Veritas Alta Recovery Vault can be improved by changing their license model and being more flexible. Currently, they are charging us for the size of the backup storage, while some other solutions claim to have unlimited backup storage. The pricing is increasing heavily. Since it is an enterprise solution, it is okay that it should be expensive, but they need to enhance their license model because they are selling only for a minimum of 1,000 Office 365 users. For a small environment, this is not applicable. Additionally, they are providing only 2TB per user, so I need to purchase extra storage since the default storage that comes with the normal user license is not enough. They need to enhance their pricing and licensing model.
The issue I face with Veritas Alta Recovery Vault is that if I need to move from their service to other solutions, there is no clear idea about the grace period to migrate the backup data to another solution, and it relies only on the user. This is also one more concern; if I want to go with them and buy their solution, I need to be careful because it feels like a one-way ticket.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Veritas Alta Recovery Vault for almost five years.
How are customer service and support?
I chose eight out of ten for Veritas Alta Recovery Vault because of the price and the response time of support.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We are using Veeam for on-prem workloads and servers, and I am still using Veeam for on-prem, but for Office 365, I switched to Veritas Alta Recovery Vault.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment, especially in having fewer employees needed and big time saved.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The setup cost for Veritas Alta Recovery Vault is included with the license, but their pricing is a little expensive compared with other solutions.
What other advice do I have?
Since we are a construction company, I find that I rely on email communications heavily, so I consider our backup using Veritas Alta Recovery Vault not just as an archive, but I can use it as an archive to keep backup for long retention. They have many advanced cases or features. They have good flexibility options to restore whether single items, or directly to the live environment, or export it manually and attach it to the user computers. Even they have some features to give access to the users to restore their items depending on the policy. They have a lot of features, and as a SaaS solution, there is no hardware or implementation. The backend connectors are implemented by them, and I only manage these connectors for the schedule, RTO, and RPO. The storage and the backup server are managed by them.
The content, the ad-hoc search, the configuration of the backup, the license, and the monitoring are all important features of Veritas Alta Recovery Vault. Even for SharePoint, in case I have a SharePoint expanding and do not have enough license for Office 365, I can enable the stubbing and rely on the SharePoint to be on the backup of the SharePoint. This allows me to reduce the live storage of the SharePoint and point it to the backup, so people can access their SharePoint sites and upload many documents without adding an extra license from Office 365, relying on this stubbing feature.
Regarding Veritas Alta Recovery Vault's AI capabilities, they have very good accuracy, with almost 99% accurate statistics or numbers. For reliability, I can rely on them; it is a very reliable solution. My overall rating for Veritas Alta Recovery Vault is eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?