Veeam Software Group GmbH today announced that it has acquired Alcion Inc., a startup with a platform for protecting Microsoft 365 environments from data loss.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Veeam is the world’s largest provider of enterprise backup and recovery software. According to Gartner Inc., the company had a 15.1% share of the market last year with $1.5 billion in revenue. Veeam says its installed base includes more than a half-million organizations including 74% of the Global 2000.

The company’s software enables customers to create standby copies of the data in their Amazon Web Services environments, Kubernetes clusters and other systems. Veeam also provides tools for quickly restoring those backups after a data loss event. Administrators can keep backups in an immutable, or undeletable, format to ensure that they can be recovered if the need arises.

Veeam’s data protection product for Kubernetes is based on technology it obtained through the purchase of startup Kasten Inc. in 2020. The latter company was launched three years earlier by Niraj Tolia and Vaibhav Kamra. Tolia and Kamra are also the founders of Alcion, Veeam’s latest acquisition.

San Francisco-based Alcion is backed by $29 million in venture funding. It raised the bulk of that capital, $21 million, last year through a Series A round led by Veeam. Alcion’s flagship product is a cloud platform for backing up data that companies keep in Microsoft 365.

One of the platform’s main selling points is its relatively simple interface. Alcion says that customers can start creating backups of their Microsoft 365 environments within 10 minutes of signing up. Using the platform doesn’t require technical training or the installation of additional software on a company’s systems, a task that can take a significant amount of time in large organizations.

Some ransomware strands are configured to compromise not only the production copy of a company’s data but also the backup versions. Without backups, administrators have no way of restoring encrypted files. To block such attacks, Alcion’s platform waits two weeks before completing a user request to delete backups and provides the ability to cancel such requests while they’re pending.

The platform is integrated with Microsoft’s Defender 365 cybersecurity tool. When the latter product detects malware in a Microsoft 365 environment, Alcion automatically backs up user data to ensure it can be recovered later on. The platform also schedules backups for periods of peak business activity, which ensures the information produced through that activity is backed up soon after it’s created.

“We leveraged powerful AI techniques to learn user behavior, schedule backups intelligently, remove malware, detect ransomware, and proactively schedule backups when threat signals are detected,” Alcion co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Niraj Tolia wrote in a blog post.

The acquisition will see Tolia join Veeam as chief technology officer. In that capacity, the executive will lead the development of a product called Veeam Data Cloud that the company debuted in February. It’s a managed data protection service for Microsoft 365 and Azure environments. 

Photo: Veeam