Banco Mercantil averts a ransomware attack with help from Veeam

For more than 70 years, Banco Mercantil has built up a reputation for providing high-quality banking services to the Brazilian market. Kleverton Monteiro de Assis, IT Manager at Banco Mercantil, said: “Our digital systems play a vital role in delivering exceptional customer service, so we’re continually investing in enhancing and expanding these capabilities.”

Banco Mercantil provides end-to-end services through a virtualized IT infrastructure, comprised of around 1,600 virtual machines (VMs) with a total of 160 TB of data. Ensuring availability and business continuity are key goals for the bank, but the organization’s previous backup tool made this difficult.

Rodrigo Souza, IT Senior Analyst at Banco Mercantil, said: “Backups are crucial to help us reduce the risk of cyberthreats like ransomware, but the number of issues with our previous tool was growing month after month. Our previous tool often took more than 12 hours to complete the backup process. When this happened, backups extended into business hours and impacted our customer-facing services. Backup processes would also fail frequently, requiring us to divert dozens of IT personnel away from other tasks to firefight issues.”

As Banco Mercantil prepared to take the first step on its cloud migration journey, it saw an opportunity to transform its data resilience strategy.

Renata Guimarães, IT Senior Analyst at Banco Mercantil, said: “To improve operational efficiency and agility, we decided to migrate around 800 VMs to a public cloud provider. Our provider lacked a second availability zone for Latin America, so we needed a reliable business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) solution. It was the perfect time to take a fresh look at our entire data protection strategy.”

Following an in-depth market evaluation and proof of concept process, Banco Mercantil selected Veeam Data Platform to protect its mission-critical systems.

“Veeam stood out to us as the best choice in a few important areas: reliability, efficiency, and data compression,” said Souza. “With Veeam, we were able to shrink our backup window dramatically without making any changes to our underlying IT infrastructure. Moreover, Veeam Data Platform enables us to boost compression by 50% compared to our previous tool — all while tripling our data retention policy from 30 days to 90 days.”

Today, Banco Mercantil uses Veeam’s continuous data protection technology to replicate data from on-premises and cloud environments to its DR site. For critical assets, such as databases, the company retains daily VM snapshots for 365 days, enabling on-demand recovery to any point within the previous year.

“With immutable backups from Veeam, we gain the peace of mind that our data cannot be modified after the fact — a powerful layer of defense against ransomware attacks,” said Souza. “Furthermore, replicating cloud workloads to our DR site gives us the level of data resilience we need to move confidently into the cloud.”

Using Veeam, one or two IT employees now complete all daily backup tasks within just eight hours, freeing the broader team to focus on the bank’s ongoing digital innovation program.

“With the old tool, we were always on high alert because problems were so frequent,” said Souza. “When backups ran long, it caused havoc with our production systems. We had to assemble war rooms with 20 members of the IT team just to handle those issues. With Veeam, everything works smoothly — it’s made a massive difference in our day-to-day productivity and job satisfaction.”

Banco Mercantil has already used the capabilities of Veeam to help mitigate business risk. When a large cloud VM with over 9 TB of data suddenly dropped offline, the organization was able to fully restore it from a recent backup in less than 10 minutes — a task that would have required a full day of work with the old tool. With built-in scanning and alerting, Veeam empowers the bank to proactively defend against cyberthreats.

“Recently, Veeam flagged that one of our VMs had a possible ransomware infection, so I asked our cybersecurity team to investigate,” said Souza. “Veeam helped us shut down a serious ransomware threat immediately, preventing what could otherwise have been a major incident.”

Looking ahead, Banco Mercantil plans to continue to build on its success with Veeam. In the coming months, the bank will leverage Veeam’s orchestration capabilities to enable deeper integration with its cloud services and automated failover in the event of unplanned downtime.

“In pursuit of customer service excellence, we’re continuing to grow our cloud footprint,” said Souza. “We plan to explore more opportunities to use Veeam to make our new platforms and workloads secure and resilient.”

Enables 98% faster recovery of cloud and on-premises systems
“In the past, restoring VMs or even individual files was always cumbersome and very time-consuming,” said Souza. “With Veeam, we can achieve in minutes what used to require hours of work.”

Triples data retention period while reducing physical storage requirements by 50%
With built-in compression from Veeam, Banco Mercantil can use its existing storage infrastructure more effectively — enabling it to store more copies of its data while consuming fewer storage resources.

Cuts backup times from 12 hours to eight hours, protecting customer-facing services
The bank now completed daily backups 33% faster, practically eliminating the risk of jobs overrunning into business hours and helping to ensure always-on digital banking services for customers.