Aussie Broadband builds trust in every connection with Veeam

Founded from a living room in regional Victoria in 2003, Aussie Broadband (Aussie) has grown into one of Australia’s biggest and best-loved ISPs, earning the title of Australia’s Most Trusted Telco for five years running. This hard-won reputation for excellence creates immense pressure for the company to protect their customer data. This pressure is only compounded by Aussie’s classification as an essential service provider, which makes round-the-clock availability a must.

“Any downtime is a really big deal for us,” said Ben O’Shea, General Manager Cloud and SRE at Aussie Broadband. “As an essential service, we’re subject to regulations around how we manage and respond to any major incidents. These regulations include the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act (SOCI), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and the annual ISO27001 certification. There are also the reputational consequences of something like a successful cyberattack. If our systems were breached, I'm not sure we'd be Australia's most trusted telco anymore. It makes high availability and security absolutely critical objectives."

Aussie’s business is on an upward trajectory. However, rapid growth, both organic and acquisitional, had left the company with an ever-more complex technology landscape. Meanwhile, the company’s legacy backup platforms were struggling to secure critical systems and data, making them increasingly difficult to manage. 

“To address the growing challenges and emerging opportunities before us, we initiated a two-part transformation, modernizing our stack with a Kubernetes private cloud and deploying a next-generation data-resilience platform,“ said O’Shea.

Aussie pivoted to Veeam to provide Kubernetes-native data resilience when its existing solution failed to meet their requirements.

“We were a month out from extending our previous solution to protect our containerized environment when we realized it wasn’t going to work,” said O’Shea. “Veeam stood out to us because it’s simple - you don’t need a degree in backup to use it. Plus, it delivers granular, application-aware backups and single file restore. Finally, Veeam’s strong development and integration roadmap, that perfectly aligned with our goals, sealed the deal.”

Veeam immediately won Aussie over with its speed and ease of implementation. The company deployed the Veeam Kasten control plane in a matter of hours. Integration with the Aussie’s CI/CD pipelines took about a week, and all workloads were transitioned to the platform within two weeks. Aussie is protecting critical applications including its network automation platform, DevOps assets (git repositories) and container image registries, and internal business systems (CRM and mail).

“It was seriously impressive that we were able to stick to our original timelines for deploying a data resilience solution for Kubernetes after pivoting to Veeam so late in the game,” said O’Shea. “Even better, Veeam immediately delivered impressive performance gains. After moving one legacy cluster with approximately 200,000 resources into Veeam Kasten, we saw backup times drop from 12 hours to 8 hours.” 

Aussie also deployed Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 and Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft Entra ID, to provide comprehensive data protection and recovery for key enterprise applications, data, and user profiles.

“We reached a point with our legacy Commvault solution where it was no longer a sustainable option for backing up and recovering Microsoft 365 and Entra ID data,” said O’Shea. “It made sense to extend Veeam to that part of our environment too, as we knew that both implementation and adoption would be straightforward. As an all-in-one SaaS and backup solution with limitless storage, it makes our lives so much easier and gives us much greater peace of mind for a business-critical part of our IT environment.”

Veeam offers excellent stability and ease of use. Many internal technical teams are now managing their own backup and recovery operations for the first time, which removes the time-consuming IT support lifecycle of logging tickets, triage, and escalation. For the teams tasked with day-to-day data management and protection, Veeam is also making a difference.  

“In instances where we do need to get engineering teams involved to support the business, our junior resources can usually solve most issues,” said O’Shea. “We’ve eliminated a bottleneck and increased user satisfaction in one fell swoop.”

Looking to the future, O’Shea and his team are focused on strengthening compliance and security. They plan to use Veeam to streamline evidence gathering for annual ISO 27001 certification and other regulatory requirements such as PCI DSS. They are also exploring immutable backups to harden their defenses against emerging threats. 

“With Veeam, we are confident that we can continue delivering exceptional experiences for over 780,000 broadband connections,” said O’Shea. “Veeam will help us save time on meeting our regulatory obligations, which frees us up to focus on delivering a service with a difference.”

• Replaced an unsustainable data resilience solution for its containers in just a month
  Aussie pivoted to Veeam after its legacy solution failed to meet its requirements. The company was able to deploy Veeam in just one month and immediately start enjoying performance improvements.
• Delivers 33% faster backup for a major legacy cluster
  Aussie benefits from comprehensive data protection without sacrificing speed or agility, ensuring that business runs with uninterrupted efficiency.
• Simplifies regulatory compliance to support superior service for 650,000+ customers
  By streamlining evidence gathering for their annual ISO 27001 certification and other regulatory requirements such as PCI DSS and the SOCI Act with Veeam, Aussie will save time that can be diverted to improving customer service.