Understanding Veeam Intelligence Functions – Smart Backup, Threat Detection & Automated Recovery

Introduction

Modern businesses need more than just backups—they need intelligent systems that can detect threats, reduce risks, automate protection, and accelerate recovery.
This is why Veeam Intelligence Functions have become a core part of the Veeam platform, especially with Veeam Backup & Replication v12/v13, where AI-powered features help organizations protect their data against ransomware, malware, and human error.

Veeam Intelligence, as the AI-powered assistant within the Veeam product family, is revolutionizing how we work. It’s not only built into Veeam Backup & Replication but also integrated into other Veeam products such as Veeam ONE, delivering intelligent support across the entire data protection ecosystem.

This article will focus on Veeam Intelligence’s applications within Veeam Backup & Replication; in future discussions, we’ll explore its unique value in other products like Veeam ONE.

Core Capabilities: Your 24/7 Expert Team

Veeam Intelligence is not merely a Q&A tool—it’s a full team of experts. Within Veeam Backup & Replication, whether you need an architect, support engineer, security advisor, or development engineer, it can assume the corresponding professional role. In other products like Veeam ONE, it demonstrates different expertise, providing intelligent support for monitoring, reporting, and analytics.

🏗️ Architect Role: Intelligent Advisor for System Design

When facing complex environment planning, Veeam Intelligence analyzes your VM count, business type, and RTO/RPO requirements to deliver comprehensive architectural design proposals. It not only helps predict storage growth and recommend optimal scaling timing but also identifies potential single points of failure and suggests redundancy solutions. Most importantly, it finds the most cost-effective hardware investment plan while meeting your business needs.

🔧 Support Engineer Role: Troubleshooting Powerhouse

When production issues arise, Veeam Intelligence rapidly analyzes error logs to pinpoint root causes. It doesn’t just check related configuration settings and uncover potential linked issues—it also provides clear, step-by-step troubleshooting guides to help you trace symptoms back to their true origins. Even better, it offers preventive measures to avoid recurrence.

🛡️ Security Advisor Role: Professional Guidance for Data Protection

When facing data security threats and compliance requirements, Veeam Intelligence acts like a dedicated security consultant, offering comprehensive protection recommendations. It not only analyzes current environment risks and suggests appropriate Malware Detection configurations but also provides defense strategies based on the latest threat intelligence. Notably, it delivers targeted security configuration guidance aligned with Veeam’s latest security feature updates from v12 to v13, ensuring your data protection framework consistently meets the latest security standards and compliance mandates.

💻 Development Engineer Role: Coding Partner for Automation

When you need to develop automation scripts or system integrations, Veeam Intelligence automatically generates PowerShell and Python script templates, provides REST API call examples, and delivers complete technical integration plans. This dramatically lowers the barrier to automation development, enabling tasks that once took weeks to be completed in just days.

Latest Highlight: Powered by enhanced foundational models and visible reasoning processes, each role can now see the AI’s professional analytical logic—ensuring accuracy and actionable recommendations.

New Features of Veeam Intelligence in Veeam Backup & Replication

Thanks to recent updates, Veeam Intelligence’s capabilities within Veeam Backup & Replication have taken a quantum leap. While similar features exist in other products like Veeam ONE, this article focuses specifically on VBR scenarios:

🎯 Fully Natural Language Conversations with Voice Input/Output Support

Imagine solving problems as easily as chatting with a colleague: “My backup job failed last night—error code 2934 affected my finance database backup. What should I do?” Veeam Intelligence fully understands your problem description and delivers precise solutions.

Even better, it supports voice input and output. Picture yourself sipping coffee in the morning, saying to your computer: “Give me a report on last night’s backups,” and the AI assistant instantly delivers a detailed summary. This natural interaction makes daily operations smoother and more enjoyable.

🎯 Thinking Mode Support

Veeam Intelligence follows mainstream AI trends by introducing Visible Thinking Process functionality—a now-standard feature in conversational AI. Veeam brings this convenience to the data protection field.

In Thinking Mode, the AI assistant reveals its full analytical process: from understanding the core problem, to querying relevant knowledge bases, to reasoning toward a conclusion. This transparent workflow lets you not only know “what” but also “why.”

This design helps users better understand the AI’s decision logic and enables them to ask follow-up questions about the reasoning process, creating truly meaningful human-AI dialogue experiences.

🎯 Basic and Advanced Modes

Veeam Intelligence offers two distinct working modes, striking a balance between usability and data privacy:

Basic Mode: Operates entirely on Veeam’s public knowledge base without sending your specific environment data to any external services. While it cannot access real-time data from your current VBR server, it’s sufficient for learning Veeam concepts, understanding best practices, or consulting configuration methods.

Advanced Mode: More powerful, this mode directly queries your VBR server information. It transmits relevant data from your backup server to Veeam’s AI model in the cloud, analyzes the data on your backup server, and provides tailored recommendations.

Secure Veeam Backup & Replication Login v13– Complete Guide to VBR Authentication

Secure Veeam Backup & Replication Login – Complete Guide to VBR Authentication

Introduction

Among the new features in v13, the most important are the security enhancements. Starting from this installment, I will provide a detailed introduction to the new security functions launched in v13 through practical application examples.

As cyberattacks and ransomware threats increase, securing Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) login is more important than ever. VBR is often the last line of defense for enterprise data, making it a prime target for hackers.

This guide provides a step-by-step approach to securing VBR authentication, including multi-factor authentication (MFA), account protection, and best practices to prevent unauthorized access.

Today, let's start with identity authentication. In enterprise backup architectures, the security of management console accounts and access governance is crucial. Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) now supports SAML-based single sign-on (SSO) in v13, which means you can centralize identity authentication to your organization's existing identity provider (IdP)—such as Azure EntraID. Through SAML integration, you can manage VBR logins alongside your company's account lifecycle, group policies, MFA, and auditing: operations become clearer, permission revocation is more timely, and higher compliance is achieved. This article uses Azure EntraID as an example to show you the specific methods for this integration in detail. For other similar solutions, such as Authing domestically or Okta and Auth0 internationally, you can try them yourself, following the Azure method.

Configuration Prerequisites

The prerequisites for configuring and using SAML integration are very simple; just install VBR using the latest Veeam Software Appliance. Of course, because network services are involved, there are still some necessary conditions for configuring SSO:

The VBR server must be able to access Azure EntraID's relevant endpoints.

Time synchronization: NTP servers must be correctly configured on VBR, and the time cannot be out of sync. SAML is timestamp-based, and authentication will fail if there is a deviation.

An Azure EntraID administrator account with permissions to create enterprise applications and assign users.

VBR administrator permissions, which are the foundation for configuring VBR accounts and identity integration.

The Windows machine where VBR Console is installed must correctly resolve the VBR hostname or FQDN; otherwise, the URLs in the SP/IdP Metadata won't match.

Why VBR Login Security Matters

If attackers gain access to Veeam Backup & Replication, they can delete backups or alter configurations, leaving businesses vulnerable.

📌 According to CISA Cybersecurity Guidelines, securing backup solutions is critical in mitigating ransomware risks

Configuration Method

The following configuration is divided into Azure and VBR parts and must be done in a specific order, so it is recommended to proceed sequentially.

Generate SP Information in VBR and Export Metadata

1. First, log in to the VBR console using the veeamadmin account. In VBR, open the hamburger icon (three horizontal lines) in the upper left corner and select Users and Roles from the dropdown menu.
   
   
   
2. Switch to the new Identity Provider interface in v13. By default, the Enable SAML Authentication option here is unchecked. Check it to enable it, and then look at the Service Provider (SP) Information section below. In identity authentication, VBR now acts as the service provider (SP) for the application, so we first need to install a certificate for VBR here. Click Install.
3. You can choose one from the local certificate store. Select an existing certificate from the certificate store and click Next.
4. In the certificate store, find the certificate with the Friendly Name Veeam Backup Server Certificate, then click Finish to complete.
5. At this point, you will see that the Certificate field in the SP Information section now has information, CN=<Backup Server FQDN>. The next step is to click the Download button below Install to download the XML file from the SP side and save it. This file will be used later during the Azure configuration.

Upload SP Metadata in Azure EntraID and Assign Users.

1. First, create a security group for VBR named VBR Users. Add a user to this group, for example, I added my own account.
2. In EntraID, find Enterprise apps. We need to create a new Application for VBR's identity authentication. Click New Application to create it.
3. When creating, do not choose from the catalog. Click Create your own application, then in the pop-up on the right, enter the app name and select Integrate any other application you don't find in the gallery (Non-gallery). For example, mine is called vbrsso.
   
   
   
4. After this Application is created, you will automatically be taken to the Application Overview interface. The Getting Started section clearly lists the next steps. You can configure them one by one as needed, following steps 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. For VBR, we only need to configure two: Assign users and groups, and set up single sign-on.
5. After assigning the group created in the first step, VBR Users, to this application, click the second step, Set up single sign-on. This will take you to the single sign-on configuration interface. Here, we select the SAML option to integrate with VBR.
6. After entering the SAML configuration interface, steps 1-2-3-4 are clearly listed. However, we don't need to edit each item here individually. Just find the Upload metadata file option at the top, click it, and upload the XML file we just exported from VBR. Save it to complete the single sign-on configuration here. After uploading, you can see that the URLs in Basic SAML Configuration have been correctly updated to my VBR's FQDN.
7. Next, find the last row in the SAML Certificates box in step 3 above, click the Download button next to Federation Metadata XML, and download another automatically generated XML file from Azure EntraID.

At this point, the setup on Azure is complete.

Return to VBR and update the IdP configuration information.

1. Go back to the Identity Provider interface under Users & Roles in VBR, find the Identity Provider (IdP) Information settings. This is the information for the identity provider in the single sign-on setup, which in this case is Azure Entra ID acting as the identity provider. Click Browse next to it and upload the XML file you just downloaded from Azure. After the upload is complete, you will see that all the IdP information below has been correctly updated to Microsoft's URLs.
2. After clicking OK to complete the setup, we can reopen Users and Roles to add a user. Click Add..., and the External user or group option will appear; select it.
3. In the pop-up Add User dialog box, enter the complete Azure Entra ID email address.
4. With this, the entire configuration is complete. Let's test the login. Open the VBR client, and you will see that the Sign in with SSO option has appeared. Click on it directly.
5. After clicking, the login window will automatically pop up with the standard Microsoft login interface. After entering the password, the Microsoft MFA approval for login will also pop up. After approving it on the mobile Authenticator app, the VBR Console will successfully redirect and log in.
6. Let's also try the web interface. In the WebUI, we can similarly see the new Sign in With SSO option.
   
   
   
7. Likewise, after approving the login, we can access the Web UI with Veeam permissions. In the upper right corner of the Web UI, we can see that the accessing user's account and email are correctly displayed.

Viewing login audit information in Azure

In the Azure Entra ID management audit interface, you can clearly see the login information from VBR.

👉 Related reading: Veeam File-Level Recovery Guide

Conclusion

By following the above method, the integration between VBR and Azure Entra ID can be easily configured. It is important to note that users configured this way are only backup system users. They cannot log in to the Appliance's Veeam Management Console like the veeamadmin and veeamso accounts can; this SSO account cannot manage the Appliance.

From a security perspective, this configuration effectively separates backup system permissions. The authentication for the backup system is completely separated from the accounts for the backup infrastructure, which better complies with the usage standards of large enterprises and organizations.