Detmold Group protects global manufacturing operations with data resilience from Veeam

Through its Detpak, PaperPak, and Detmold Packaging Sales businesses, Detmold Group offers paper and packaging solutions to enterprises around the world. Supplying some of the world’s largest and most iconic food and retail brands, the group operates global manufacturing facilities that are designed to integrate seamlessly into customer supply chains.

“We have an aggressive strategy for innovation, sales and business growth,” said Marc Koenecke, ICT manager at Detmold Group. “As part of this long-term roadmap, we are now expanding our operations significantly in Europe and North America.”

As a global manufacturing company, Detmold Group deals with complex planning and supply chain processes. The organization also depends on its digital systems to keep operations running smoothly.

“We have a concept called ‘million-dollar minutes’ for some of our most vital applications, which demonstrates just how important availability and data resilience are to the business,” said Koenecke. “A single day of downtime to a critical system such as our ERP or CRM platform could result in over $10 million in lost revenue, so we aim to ensure that our digital services are well protected.”

To support its ongoing business growth, Detmold Group is modernizing its global IT infrastructure, which now includes hyperconverged Nutanix clusters for each international business unit, as well as cloud solutions including Microsoft 365 and Salesforce. However, relying on manual work and freeware tools to create and manage backups consumed substantial time and increased the complexity of the company’s data protection process.

“We see the ability to recover our systems rapidly and reliably as a powerful way to mitigate risk across our global business,” said Koenecke.

To enhance data resilience, Detmold Group uses Veeam Data Platform to deliver effective, automated backups for critical systems, including more than 118 virtual machines (VMs) across three on-premises Nutanix clusters.

“When we first started with Veeam, we focused on improving the efficiency and reliability of our server backups,” said Koenecke. “In each of the countries we operate in, we now use Veeam to replicate two copies of production data to network-attached storage [NAS] arrays. Veeam makes it very easy for us to keep track of our backup jobs and to identify performance bottlenecks in our hardware.”

Building on the success of using Veeam for its on-premises environments, Detmold Group decided to expand its data protection capabilities to the cloud. Working with its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) partner, the company deployed Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, which enabled them to store immutable copies of mailboxes and other key cloud data.

“Our partner 11:11 Systems offers us the powerful capabilities of Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 combined with unlimited storage for our data backups,” said Koenecke. “Native cloud backup capabilities don’t come close to the level of speed and granularity we get with Veeam. With Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, we can restore everything from individual mailboxes to large groups of users with just a couple of clicks.”

Detmold Group saw an opportunity to leverage Veeam to offer enhanced protection for another of its key systems: Salesforce. In the past, the organization relied on tenant backups of its CRM system, but this approach was unable to capture key data like file attachments and custom fields.

“We were very limited in what we could restore using native Salesforce backups,” said Koenecke. “Just like Microsoft 365, Veeam stood out in its ability to thoroughly protect all our Salesforce data, including custom objects, access permissions, and workflows.”

Detmold Group has partnered with Veeam to protect its business data for more than seven years — and the organization continues to find the solutions an ideal fit for its business.

“All our Veeam solutions are extremely easy to use — we just point them at the data source, configured and schedule the job, and they’re all set,” said Koenecke. “When new people join our team, they are always up and running with Veeam very quickly. Over the years, if we have come up against a more complex problem or wanted to learn about new features, we’ve used Veeam University and the community forums to find the information we needed.”

As its business grows, Detmold Group uses the capabilities of Veeam to help safeguard its mission-critical systems. While the group’s data has grown at a rate of 10% year-over-year, Veeam enables it to comfortably meet its two-hour RTOs and RPOs.

“We back up around 2 TB of change data a week with Veeam, which is mostly driven by our planning and forecasting systems for manufacturing and logistics,” said Koenecke. “Working with an industry leader like Veeam with an excellent reputation for data resilience gives our leadership confidence that our key systems are protected 24/7.”

During critical moments, Detmold Group has found Veeam to be a dependable solution. When a C-level executive’s mailbox suddenly became corrupted and inaccessible, the organization used Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 to quickly restore it. Plus, when the group’s vital ERP system experienced a database crash, Veeam played a key role in getting the organization back on its feet.

“Using Veeam, we were able to restore our ERP database using a backup that was only 30 minutes old,” said Koenecke. “Less than an hour later, and we’d used Veeam to restore our ERP system into production. Having a single point of control for all our backup and recovery needs is a massive advantage.”

As Detmold Group’s IT modernization initiative continues, the organization plans to increase its cloud footprint and will use Veeam to help protect the new environments.

“Veeam is always an easy sell for us internally, because they offer clear pricing and strong benefits,” said Koenecke. “Looking ahead, we’re very interested in deepening our partnership as we build out our cloud services.”

• Enables efficient recovery within a two-hour RPO and RTO
  When every minute of downtime counts, Detmold Group trusts Veeam to restore key systems quickly and reliably. “When we used Veeam in a real-world disaster recovery scenario, we were able to restore our mission-critical ERP database in less than an hour,” said Koenecke.
• Protects cloud and on-premises data, growing by 10% year-over-year
  Detmold Group is growing its global business and expanding its on-premises and cloud footprint at the same time. With Veeam, the organization can ensure the rising volumes of data are always protected.
• Cuts time to proficiency for new employees with an intuitive user experience
  “Our new joiners never have trouble getting started with Veeam,” said Koenecke. “The solutions are really easy to use, which makes it very simple to train people up.”