Baglioni Hotels & Resorts deploys Veeam to support and ensure award winning guest services

The business challenge

As they already did for Centeral Reservation Office, Wi-Fi infrastructure, ERP, CRM and other, Baglioni Hotels wanted to manage backup and disaster recovery from a single place, with a simple and secure platform. The fundamental requirement was to grant 24/7 business continuity and at the same time a low investment on local IT. These needs support the Baglioni Hotels objective of putting priority on resources and efforts where they matter most, namely on the guest experience. “We need local employees focused on our core business: high level hospitality and services,” said Alessandro Bruni, CIO at Baglioni Hotels Collection.

“We are a company that takes care of details, we take very good care of our guests and service expectations are very high. Customers are expecting to have very high level of service in terms of quality, which means having reliable and high-quality services delivered. This can be done working hard on processes and quality testing with internal and external auditors and taking care of all the infrastructure which is behind the scenes, but a very important part of the business,” said Bruni.

Additionally, Baglioni Hotels required an efficient and cost-effective method for keeping data accessible in the various locations of the properties.T he company was looking for a partner and a solution that would fit their customer’s high expectations in terms of service level because they were used to working with old solutions that were covering only backups. In order to keep up, a different vision and solution was needed to ensure business continuity.

“We want to move completely in the cloud, so we are planning to work on redesigning and moving to the cloud the servers that we have in every single property. This will be a hybrid cloud, part of it in a public cloud and the other in a private cloud. This can only be done with a proper partner, which is Veeam for us. We also need to have the proper features to manage our business continuity processes that we want to continue having in the new environment.”

The Veeam solution

The convergence and availability of data are critical assets to every hospitality company. Without timely and accessible data, all important guest experiences can suffer. Furthermore, Baglioni Hotels was dealing with a scattered IT environment that created some additional financial and managerial challenges. With Veeam, they now enjoy a convergent architecture that simplifies and centralizes data management while extending a consistent Cloud Data Management architecture to multiple properties, extending as far as the Maldives. “We recently implemented in the Maldives the Veeam Agents solution that for us is magic because we now manage the entire business continuity of an IT infrastructure in the middle of the Indian Ocean from a single place.” said Bruni. Following a proof of concept in Milano, all the Italian and London offices have been using Veeam and this is now the model that will be used for the future activations of all offices and locations in the Baglioni Hotels Collection.

Veeam is helping Baglioni Hotels with security too. By ensuring data remains available and properly stored, the hotels can comply with things like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) while implementing parallel business continuity and disaster recovery environments required for business operations. “In the past we were able to restore just files and folders; now we have real business continuity in a snap,” said Bruni.

The results

• Managing all the local IT services across the hotels without needing local IT staff on site at each property, resulting in lower costs
• Assurance of business continuity and planning for a hybrid cloud environment
• High-end quest experiences that sustain brand reputation and mission