Resilience unlocked: How Creditreform harnesses data portability and navigates DORA compliance with Veeam

Creditreform comprises of 130 largely autonomous companies. One of these companies, Creditreform Hamburg von der Decken KG (Creditreform Hamburg), also manages IT systems and operations on behalf of eight other Creditreform businesses in the north of Germany. In total, the data from these organizations weighs in at approximately 16 TB, all of which must be scrupulously protected against loss or corruption.

“Data is the most critical asset for our business,” said Martin Hermann, Head of IT at Creditreform Hamburg von der Decken KG. “We need to be able to back it up rapidly, ensure data portability, and restore systems as fast as possible in the event of some kind of incident.”

In addition to outpacing emerging threats, including ransomware, the Creditreform Hamburg team must continually adapt to new regulations such as DORA, which aims to bolster the digital resilience of financial entities in the EU.

“Keeping data protected and systems recoverable should be the most important objectives for any IT organization.”
Martin Hermann, Head of IT, Creditreform Hamburg von der Decken KG

Almost 15 years after first choosing the solution, Creditreform Hamburg continues to rely on Veeam to provide resilience for its data and systems.

“Our previous Arcserve backup solution was tricky to manage even when we had plenty of experience, and it wasn’t well adapted to virtualized environments,” said Hermann. “At the time, Veeam’s slogan was ‘complete your first backup within 15 minutes.’ We tested it, it was simple, and we achieved the 15-minute goal. We were convinced it was the right solution for Creditreform Hamburg, and that’s still the case.”

Today, Creditreform Hamburg uses Veeam to protect a six-node VMware vSphere environment running on Lenovo ThinkAgile servers with built-in flash storage. These host more than 100 VMs that encompass a total of 19 TB of data.

The organization performs full backups of all VMs every Saturday and nightly incremental backups throughout the week. Creditreform Hamburg also uses Veeam extensions to provide continuous data protection for ten key Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL databases. Veeam replication features enable the organization to take snapshots of these databases every 30 minutes without impacting business users.

Veeam also makes it easy to perform granular recovery. For example, of a single Outlook mailbox or even a single email. “With all the different Veeam add-ons that are available, we can look into backups and recover just what we need,” said Hermann. “This makes it much faster, because we don’t need to mount the entire backup.”

Beyond backup and recovery, Creditreform Hamburg recently used Veeam to quickly and easily migrate to a new VMware environment. The organization tested other options, including VMware’s own tools, but determined that Veeam provided the fastest and surest option.

“By enabling us to move data easily between platforms, Veeam unlocks data portability that increases our agility and reduces risk,” said Hermann. “We’re taking advantage of this to optimize our IT environment to best support the business.”

On the administrative side, Creditreform Hamburg benefits from Veeam ONE monitoring and analytics to gain a real-time overview of its backup environment. This solution helps the IT team uncover potential gaps in capability and reveal possible compliance issues and provides reporting on resource usage across the different Creditreform companies. This enables the Hamburg organization to attribute charge-back fees accurately.

• Enables 95% faster data recovery
  With granular recovery powered by Veeam, Creditreform Hamburg can recover anything from a single email to a full 50 GB mailbox within 30 minutes, versus up to a full day with its previous data protection solution. Restoring a typical 300 GB VM requires less than one hour and the recent migration of a 4 TB mail archive took just seven hours.
• Continuously protects key systems and data
  “Veeam gives us very fast backup and recovery for key systems,” said Hermann. “Replication enables us to take rolling 30-minute snapshots of our most important VMs so that we can very quickly roll back to a known working copy.”
• Unlocks data portability, facilitating the seamless migration of 100+ VMs
  “Veeam did an absolutely brilliant job of migrating more than 100 VMs,” said Hermann. “We used SureBackup to test recoverability in a sandbox, actually powering on and testing the backups, giving us confidence in the migration plan.”