Veeam Acquires Microsoft 365 Startup Alcion

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

Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Veeam is the world’s largest provider of enterprise backup and recovery software. According to Gartner Inc., the company had a market share of 15.1% last year with revenues of $1.5 billion. Veeam says its installed base includes more than half a 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 to quickly restore those backups after a data loss event. Administrators can keep backups in an immutable or non-removable format to ensure they can be restored if needed.

Veeam’s data protection product for Kubernetes is based on technology it acquired through the purchase from startup Kasten Inc. in 2020. The latter company was founded 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 capital. It raised the bulk of that capital, $21 million, last year in a Series A round led by Veeam. Alcion’s flagship product is a cloud platform for backing up data that companies store in Microsoft 365.

One of the platform’s key selling points is its relatively simple interface. Alcion says customers can start backing up their Microsoft 365 environments within 10 minutes of signing up. Using the platform doesn’t require any technical training or installing additional software on a company’s systems, a task that can be time-consuming in large organizations.

Some ransomware strains 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 to restore 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. The platform also schedules backups for periods of peak business activity, ensuring that information produced by that activity is backed up quickly after it is created.

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

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

Photo: Veeam