Awe and Wonder at Veeam 100 Summit in Prague

I have been thinking a lot recently about the ideas of awe and wonder. As I am getting older and a little more jaded, I find myself in a funk sometimes because a lot of days end up looking and feeling like a lot of other days. I have been reminded often about the power of seeing new things and also seeing old things in new ways. It is this power of awe and wonder which I think is essential in a life well lived.

I recently spent a week in Prague where I attended my first Veeam 100 Summit with a wonderful group of Veeam Vanguards, Legends, and MVPs. Veeam Vanguards are those who are ambassadors for the Veeam products and write blogs and articles promoting the Veeam products. Veeam Legends are more on the technical side helping people who have questions in the R&D forums, Community forums, Veeam’s Reddit channel, and/or on their own blogs. Veeam MVPs are employees who go above and beyond the call of duty to assist users, promote products, support customers, connect people, and generally be amazing resources. In addition to that talented group, product managers, product analysts, and senior architects from Veeam were there. This was an incredible opportunity to network with a wide variety of people and share our experiences working with Veeam and help to guide Veeam’s direction for features and products.

On the plane ride home, I read an article by Dacher Keltner, who is a professor of psychology at The University of California, Berkley and the faculty director of the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center. He also hosts the podcast, “The Science of Happiness”. The article was about “The Power of Awe” and I was captivated by how well it encapsulated how I am feeling after the week in Prague. Keltner’s research shows that people find awe in the “eight wonders of life” which are: the moral beauty of others, collective movement, nature, visual design, music, spirituality, big ideas, and encountering the beginning and end of life. Now, don’t get me wrong. I did not experience all of those eight this week but when I read about them, it struck me that a lot of them were present and contributed to my week of awe and wonder.

Let’s get the obvious ones out of the way: Nature and Visual Design. If you’ve never been to Prague, it is a city of spectacular beauty and rich history. Just walking around Old Town everywhere you look, there are gorgeous buildings like these.

And getting outside of the city, you are rewarded with breathtaking vistas like this

Now the next Wonder is about Big Ideas and there were many of those over the three days of intense sessions outlining all the new features and additions to the Veeam Data Platform. There were extensive discussions around Veeam’s commitment to Radical Resilience. In Veeam’s words, they want to “help every company in the world not just bounce back from an outage or data loss, but to bounce forward.” They announced many security enhancements across their product suite which will incorporate features such as

• enhanced malware detection
• SureBackup malware scanning without having to create a virtual lab
• file encryption detection
• KMS integration
• requirement for a second person to approve important changes (four eyes rule)
• introduction of YARA rules which can be customized for comprehensive detection of compromised systems and files or confidential information
• additions to the Security and Compliance analyzer (8 new infrastructure checks, 13 new product configuration checks, automated email reporting)
• integration with syslog servers for even more comprehensive security monitoring and reporting.
• a new Veeam Threat Center which will offer a single dashboard to see security compliance, platform deployment health, data protection health, and data security information. This will allow drilldowns to faster pinpoint and remediate areas of concern.

The above are just some of the enhancements relating to their promise of Radical Resilience. In addition there are going to be many, many more enhancements to

• enterprise application agent backups
• recovery orchestration
• analytics in Veeam ONE
• object storage backup
• NAS storage backup
• major enhancements to the Veeam Backup for M365
• major improvements and streamlining of the Veeam Backup for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud products.

The bottom line is that the three days of presentations were full of Big Ideas.

The Veeam 100 and all the Veeam staff are not all business. There were opportunities for socializing and loosening up at events such as:

• The Opening Reception sponsored by Object First
• The Veeam100 Toast which brought together spirits that participants brought from their home countries that we all shared
• The Poker Night sponsored by Wasabi
• The Final Evening event at Opero during which people still had THIS much fun despite a brief period where there was NO BEER

After that event at Opero, many of us ended up at The Dubliner, an Irish bar in Old Town where we proceeded to take over and dive headlong into the Wonders of Music and Collective Movement. There was much singing and dancing to the amazing music of Elias & the Shepherds.

The final Wonder I want to touch upon is the first in Keltner’s list, Moral Beauty of Others. It was one which struck a chord with me but I had to spend some time mulling over it to see if I could put it into words. The week was not without it’s incidents. A central speaker, Anthony Spiteri, had his only viable flight from Australia cancelled. Another central speaker, Michael Cade, got very ill on the last day and had to leave early. A few Veeam 100 folks ended up either in the hospital or clinic for some fairly serious accidents or health issues. Throughout all of that, the outpouring of support and caring (in addition to some good hearted teasing) showed me that this community takes care of each other.

I have seen other initiatives such as Women In Green (https://careers.veeam.com/women-at-veeam) which empowers women to greater success in tech. At Veeam Canada, I know that they are making an effort to look for and spotlight indigenous products when deciding on things to give away at events.

This is what seems to differentiate Veeam. They build Community. Through the hard work of people like Rick Vanover, Madalina Cristil, Nikola Pejková, and Safiya Mohamed who manage the Veeam Legends and Vanguards and Nikki Adkins and her team who coordinate global events, Veeam puts Community at the heart of what they do and it shows in the spirit of connectedness and collaboration I felt during my time in Prague for the Veeam 100 Summit.

I very much look forward to seeing these people again in person and, in the meantime, interacting with them online. I feel a renewed sense of momentum and I believe it is directly attributed to the Awe and Wonder I experienced during that week.