Preface: A while ago I was asked by an enterprise customer from Europe to design a Veeam backup solution for their Microsoft Azure environment. The setup was a classic Hub-and-Spoke architecture, and the goal was clear: leave the on-premises vSphere platform behind and run all workloads in Azure instead. Before any of that would happen,…
Preface: After some time, I finally managed to continue working on the hardening script and integrate a number of new ideas. This time my approach was slightly different. Besides improving and restructuring the coding style to make the script easier to read and maintain, I also tried to integrate the recommendations from the Veeam Security…
Personal note: It has been some time since the initial release of my AV exclusion script (v1.0). The community response has been overwhelmingly positive, and I also received several valuable suggestions around optimization and overall design. Based on this feedback, I’ve revised a number of parameters and performed a general refactoring of the script. A…
Disclaimer: I actually wanted to publish this post earlier, but I had a small health issue that delayed my plans a bit. In this post, I mainly want to share a few brief thoughts. There are already so many incredibly good and informative blog posts about the recent Veeam 100 Summit in Prague. Therefore, I…
Preface: Veeam recently published the first version of a pre-hardened VBR v13 appliance based on linux. I totally understand and also support this approach and I am pretty sure that this is not only the right decision but also the right direction as well as one of the greatest releases Veeam has ever had. Nevertheless…
For the past several weeks, I have been deeply involved in managing a major cyber incident at one of my customers. Disclaimer: This is a European customer classified as SMB! Talking about enterprise customers in larger scales this situation might be handled differently! I also don’t privode too much details about this scenario to both…
My idea: I have many customers using Veeam with an Advanced Design (virtualized VBR and other components) using separate VLANs in combination with OS hardening and Windows Defender as default antivirus solution. I know only a very few customers that apply AV exclusions as per Veeam best practice which may lead to performance issues and…
Preface: As mentioned in the past, I have made it my mission to continuously develop my Veeam Windows Hardening script. To fulfill this commitment, I have now completed and released version 1.1 “PAW” of the script. I often face the challenge that customers start using PAWs (Privileged Access Workstations) as single point of contact for…
Preface: As mentioned in the past, I have made it my mission to continuously develop my Veeam Windows Hardening script. To fulfill this commitment, I have now completed and released version 1.1 of the script. The changes compared to the previous version can be found in the change log below! Disclaimer: Important: I do not…
Based on my Veeam Windows Hardening Script, there are various additional ways to further enhance the security of individual components—and, consequently, the overall security. As previously announced (e.g., at the Veeam User Group Meeting in Munich in November 2024), I would like to explore the possibility of implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) at the Windows level….
