#1 Global Leader in Data Resilience

Big Bus Tours moves to the cloud and Microsoft 365 with data resilience from Veeam

Veeam helps our small team embrace a new kind of working and focus on developing innovative digital offerings for our customers.
David Knowles
CTO, Big Bus Tours

The Business Challenge

Big Bus Tours entertains people across the world, encouraging customers to discover and explore, from Paris and London to Dubai and Hong Kong. Founded on a philosophy of “think global and act local,” the company is expanding both organically and through acquisitions, including adjacent markets.

In the past, Big Bus Tours operated a wide variety of IT systems and networks, relying on a central data center for backup and recovery services. During the COVID-19 pandemic, while customers stayed at home and the buses waited in their depots, the Big Bus Tours team seized the opportunity to reconsider its IT strategy and implement new solutions.

“During normal operations, we backed up all our data to our central data center in London,” said David Knowles, CTO at Big Bus Tours. “We knew we had multiple single points of failure across our core line of business applications, and if these failed the operational business would be impacted. Recovering from our secondary data center or offsite backups was a long-winded and manually intensive process. The operational pause created by the COVID-19 lockdowns presented the opportunity to review this approach and improve both our resilience and recovery times.”

Big Bus Tours adopted a cloud-first policy for its corporate technology and line-of-business systems, including migrating its users to Microsoft 365 solutions. Adopting as-a-service platforms enabled Big Bus Tours to maintain a lean internal team while taking advantage of new capabilities, such as variable ticket pricing and improved integration with third parties. To keep the new environments running smoothly, the company looked for a modern data protection solution.

The Veeam Solution

To mitigate the impact of unplanned downtime and to protect the critical dynamic ticket pricing data, the Big Bus Tours team looked to drastically reduce its recovery time, and to introduce a greatly reduced recovery point.  

“As an IT strategy, we chose to move core systems to the cloud. For backup and recovery, we wanted a solution that was as hands-off as possible for our lean team and looked to reduce our dependency on key people knowing how to operate a platform in disaster situations,” said Knowles. “We selected Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 after completing a very comprehensive RFP process, and Veeam was the stand-out solution.”

Using Veeam, Big Bus Tours backs up around 40 TB of Microsoft 365 data, with the option to scale up easily as the company grows organically or through acquisition. Big Bus Tours backs up user data three times a day, with a forever-retention policy that helps to ensure compliance with governance standards for all its operating areas, such as Europe’s GDPR and California’s CCPA.

The new cloud-first infrastructure, secured with Veeam, has also vastly improved the company’s recovery time objective (RTO). Where previously Big Bus Tours could take up to seven days to restore data from tape backups, with Veeam the company can recover data within hours — and for some systems, even within minutes — including fine-grained recovery of single files.

For the critical data that underpins capabilities such as dynamic pricing, swift recovery is key in a disaster scenario. “We couldn’t afford to lose this data for a whole week if we want to continue innovating at pace,” said Knowles. “With Veeam we can protect and recover data to help ensure we mitigate risk as effectively as possible,” said Knowles.

As Big Bus Tours looks to the future, Veeam will additionally support the integration of acquired companies. “In the past, it would not only take us a long time to incorporate new infrastructures into our portfolio, but we also would inevitably miss backing up some things — people forget to tell you about the odd PC under a desk,” said Knowles. “Now, any new Microsoft instance is backed up automatically and we can scale up the capacity for acquisitions effortlessly.”

Most of all, Big Bus Tours appreciates the confidence it can have in its backups without putting strain on its IT team. “The effort of managing backups is very low now,” said Knowles. “There are 14 of us, and only five permanent ops people. With Veeam handling backup and recovery, our lean team has the time to focus on developing innovative digital offerings for our customers to help grow the business.”

The Results

  • Reduces RTO from a week to just a few hours
    By supporting Big Bus Tours’ move from on-premises to the cloud, Veeam has helped the company reduce its RTO from five to seven days to just a few hours or even minutes.
  • Enables easy scaling to support business growth
    Veeam automatically starts backing up any new data from business acquisitions by Big Bus Tours, significantly reducing administration. “Veeam helps our small team embrace a new kind of working and focus on developing innovative digital offerings for our customers,” said Knowles.
  • Enhances global data governance with forever data retention policy
    Because Veeam manages backup infrastructure as a service, Big Bus Tours can manage increased volumes even with its lean IT team.

Company:

Established in 2011 through the merger of Big Bus Company and Les Cars Rouges, Big Bus Tours is the largest international operator of open-top-bus sightseeing tours. Operating in more than 27 cities across 11 countries, Big Bus Tours aims to create memorable experiences and inspire exploration.

Challenge:

As Big Bus Tours continues to grow, it aims to keep the operational systems and processes underpinning its business running smoothly. After standardizing its corporate technology landscape — including a global rollout of Microsoft 365 — Big Bus Tours looked for the best way to protect its new environments.

Results:

  • Reduces recovery time objective from one week to just a few hours
  • Enables easy scaling to support business growth
  • Enhances global data governance with forever data retention policy