A-Z on Veeam Data Cloud: Workload Enrollment and Onboarding
This guide discusses the “A-Z on Veeam Data Cloud: Workload Enrollment and Onboarding”. Veeam Data Cloud (VDC) delivers unified data protection through a powerful, centralised SaaS platform. It enables service providers and organisations to protect Microsoft workloads such as Azure, Microsoft 365, and Salesforce from a single management portal. Please, see A real case of Internal Sabotage and Recovery, and Veeam Enterprise Manager setup and User Role management.
With VDC, you actively strengthen data resilience and ensure business continuity using an intuitive yet enterprise-grade solution. Also, see this link on how to protect Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365. As shown in the image below. VDC unifies management across multiple services via a single UI, leveraging Veeam’s core backup tech for security and scalability
All features run on shared services with a unified multi-workload UI/UX. This simplifies operations, and no additional tools or logins are needed. Below are some core components of Veeam Data Cloud.
- Data Backup: Automated, policy-driven backups for protected workloads.
- Data Recovery: Granular, fast restores with verification tools like SureBackup.
- Data Security: Immutability, encryption (AES-256), logical air-gapping against ransomware.
- Data Intelligence: AI-driven insights, monitoring, reporting, and threat detection.
- Data Portability: Seamless data movement across clouds and apps.
Please, see How to Create a User and Custom Domain in Entra ID, and how to Delete Azure Tenant: Remove Custom Domain from Entra ID. Also, see “PetitPotam attack on Active Directory Certificate Services: How to mitigate NTLM Relay PetitPotam attack on AD CS“.
Why Back Up Azure, Entra ID, and Microsoft 365
Due to the Microsoft Shared Responsibility Model, Microsoft ensures infrastructure uptime (hardware availability, service continuity). Microsoft does not guarantee your recoverability, and accidental deletion, configuration changes, or ransomware effects are on you.
In the past, I have explicitly pointed this out for Microsoft 365. Organisations often assume Microsoft backs up everything, but that’s false.
Please see Why should you use Veeam to protect your Microsoft 365 Data, and Veeam Backup Deployment options for Microsoft 365 Data.
Below are some of the protected Workloads as shown in the image above:
- Vault: Secure, immutable cloud storage for off-site backups
- M365: Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams (now unified with others).
- Entra ID: Users, groups, apps, metadata for identity resilience.
- Azure: VMs, SQL, Files via Veeam Data Cloud for Azure.
Veeaam Data Cloud Onboarding
If you are not part of the Veeam 100 program and did not receive access to test Veeam Data Cloud. You can request your own Veeam Data Cloud demo today. Take control of your data protection strategy and recover instantly from data loss across Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Azure, and Salesforce.
Since I have been onboarded as a customer. All I need to do is accept the invite in this beautiful email.as shared below
Select a sign-in method as shown below
You will be required to pick an account.
Check the consent and accept the permissions.
Pick an account as shown below
On the overview page listing, you can see the connected subscriptions across supported workloads like M365, Azure, and Entra ID. To access or log in to Veeam Data Cloud, use the following URL.
As you can see, three invitations are currently pending. We need to accept these invitations either directly from the email notification or from within the workload session. I will walk you through both methods as we proceed. Feel free to take a tour of the VDC here under explore “Veeam Data Cloud”.
Please, see Building VIHR: Ransomware-Proof Repository with Veeam JeOS, how to fix the ” Failed to connect to Deployer Service Error, and how to upgrade legacy VHR to Veeam Infrastructure Hardened Repository.
Add Entra ID Tenant
Click on “Accept Invite” from the email, and on the connection step, select “Authorise”.
Pick an account as shown below if you have multiple Microsoft accounts.
Accept the permissions as shown below
As you can see, the authorisation was successful. Click on Next to proceed.
Note: You will have to access Microsoft Azure to get the Entra ID name as shown below.
Enter the Entra ID Tenant name and select a region to store your backup data. This step is very vital due to data residency, etc.
I’m fine with the defaults below, and will click Next.
On the confirmation step, if you are fine. Hit the Finish button as shown below.
The Tenant is currently being provisioned as shown below.
Data Cloud will create the initial backup of your Microsoft Entra ID tenant. You will receive an email notification once the initial backup of Entra ID objects and Entra ID log is completed.
Later, Veeam Data Cloud sends email notifications only if a backup fails.
You can inspect the logs as shown below and click on OK.
Please, see Azure Hybrid Use Cases and Benefits, how to Set up Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure, and “The application /Certsrv does not exist: How to configure Certificate Enrollment Web Services and Certificate Authority Web Enrolment“.
Provision Azure Tenant
We will employ the same approach as above and accept the invite to provision the Azure tenant in VDC. Please, read the welcome screen and authorise.
You will be requested to pick an account as shown below.
Accept the permissions requested.
Authorisation is successful, and click on Next now.
Select your desired subscription for the Azure Tenant. Then, click Next.
If you run into the below error. This error occurs because your current user account lacks the Microsoft.Authorisation/roleAssignments/write permission needed to protect Azure resources by assigning roles at the selected subscription scope. Please see this guide on how to fix the user must have at least permission on these subscriptions.
To fix this issue, I will not be using the following roles “Microsoft.Authorisation/roleAssignments/write” but the “owner” role access on the target subscription
Now that the issue is fixed, we can proceed. Select the default management region and click next
On the summary page, click on Finish.
As you can see, the Azure Tenant is being provisioned.
Please, see Unable to Remove Orphaned VHR Repository v2 from VBR v13, What Ransomware Recovery looks like when the clock is ticking, and how to Join Bulk Devices using a Provisioning Package to Azure.
Add Microsoft 365
From the workload, navigatee to the Action section and click on the ellipses (…) often referred to as three dots, and click on “Activate Invitation”.
Enter the Tenant name and from the Storage Region drop-down list, select a Microsoft Azure region where the backup infrastructure and storage will be provisioned. Then, click next
At the connection step, copy the code below. Then click on the link in step 2, and you will be redirected to a new window.
Kindly enter the code here and click on Next
Pick an account to sign-in
Accept the permissions
You can now close this browser window as sign-in is complete.
Click Next on the connection step to proceed.
M365 tenant is being provisioned as shown below.
At the Backup step of the wizard, select whether Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 should automatically configure backup policies or let you manually create the policies after onboarding. I am fine with other defaults and will click on Next.
At the summary page, I will click on Finish as shown below.
As you can see, M365 is already provisioned.
You can start managing your workload by clicking on the domain or the ellipses and then clicking on Manage.
Please, see Microsoft Azure Active Directory: How to setup Azure AD Tenant, how to add and verify a custom domain name to Azure Active Directory, and how to set up Devolusion Remote Desktop Manager on Windows.
Viewing Dashboard
The Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 dashboard contains information on the state of backups, users and licenses, as well as information about user activity. As you can see below, our backup is currently running. You can read more on this from here.
For Azure, you can also manage and access the dashboard as shown below. The Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft Azure dashboard provides information on the state of backup and restore sessions and protected Microsoft Azure resources.
Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft Entra ID dashboard contains information on the state of the protection of your Microsoft Entra ID tenant. The number of protected objects and the recent restore sessions.
Please, see Hardening Your Infrastructure: A Guide to VMware VBS and MS GPO Credential Guard in VBR v13, how to fix the Filesystem root is running low on Disk space, and A-Z of XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra setup and VM Creation.
Organization Overview
A Veeam Data Cloud organisation incorporates your Veeam Data Cloud accounts and one or more subscriptions for the workloads you want to protect. On the Overview page, you can find information about the protected workloads in your Veeam Data Cloud organization.
To protect additional workloads, request a subscription for them. You can also request a subscription for Veeam Data Cloud Vault to integrate storage vaults with other Veeam solutions. To request a subscription, select Request a subscription next to the product you want to add.
As you can see from the Veeam Data Cloud Web UI, we have successfully enrolled all our workloads, as shown below.
The organisation dashboard provides a centralised view for monitoring data protection across all workloads in your Veeam Data Cloud organisation without the need to access the individual tenants’ management. The Dashboard page contains information about tenant protection status, the number of protected objects and the recent backup sessions.
The dashboard helps you verify whether the recent data protection activities have been executed correctly. The clear visibility of errors and warnings helps you shorten your response time to issues and simplifies the prevention and troubleshooting of potential problems.
With the organisation dashboard, you can see how much data is backed up and what the current trend is. This can help you to manage your Veeam Data Cloud licenses and provide accurate budget forecasts.
I hope you found this guide on the “A-Z on Veeam Data Cloud: Workload Enrollment and Onboarding” very useful. Please, feel free to leave a comment below.
