From 5 months to 5 hours: How DIRINGER & SCHEIDEL IT Services GmbH accelerates recovery with Veeam

D&S is a highly decentralized group that manages construction sites, develops high-tech robotics systems, and runs hotels. To maintain cyber resilience and comply with strict requirements for critical infrastructure across different sectors, the company needed faster, more scalable, and more reliable data resilience processes with group-wide visibility.

“To protect the entire D&S group effectively, we have to cover 60+ server locations,” said Oded Rosenfeld, Head of IT at D&S IT Services GmbH. “We generate lots of data through activities like the video footage captured by our intelligent, state-of-the-art pipe maintenance robots that we use to repair and future-proof water networks. We also need to ensure long-term access to construction plan data for over 30 years to support refurbishment and maintenance of large property developments. Reliably backing up data and being able to recover it quickly is critical for our businesses.”

Many of the group’s businesses must comply with strict regulations, including the EU NIS2 Directive for network and information security, or are classified as critical infrastructure in Germany. These new obligations increase the pressure on D&S to strengthen its cybersecurity strategy and demonstrate consistent resilience across the group.

“Our previous data backup and recovery solutions included Veritas, Symantec, and Backup Exec backup software,” said Rosenfeld. “They were too slow, required a lot of maintenance and monitoring, and weren’t able to provide the insights we needed to efficiently ensure group-wide compliance and cyber resilience. To set us up for success, we wanted a future-proof solution that was easy to manage.”

To keep businesses across the group running without interruption, D&S chose Veeam.

“I used Veeam in a previous role for many years and had a great experience throughout,” said Rosenfeld. “I’m always looking for innovative, forward-looking solutions and Veeam delivered on this goal. When I arrived at D&S a couple of years ago and identified the issues with our previous approach, I brought in Veeam to reduce business risk by streamlining and accelerating our data resilience processes.”

D&S deployed Veeam Data Platform across its 60+ server locations, including its central data centers. To improve performance and reliability, the group upgraded its backup storage with two redundant Everpure FlashBlade systems, providing object storage for immutable backups. Together, Veeam and Everpure protect 350 production virtual machines (VMs) and 200 TB of data running on a VMware virtualization cluster. By combining Veeam Instant VM Recovery with Everpure SafeMode Snapshots, D&S accelerated recovery of mission-critical applications such as ELO ECM Suite.

“Previously, we estimate that it would have taken five and a half months to recover our entire IT environment, causing us to miss out on revenues of $30 million+ USD,” said Rosenfeld. “The combined power of Veeam and Everpure solutions makes such a slow and painful recovery a thing of the past.”

D&S also uses Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 to protect collaboration data for about 500 users. The group empowers users with Veeam self-service portals to recover emails and files independently, which increased productivity and decreased workload for central IT and support teams. The Veeam Enterprise License Program and Veeam Backup Manager provide group-wide visibility and streamline the contracts and subscriptions the teams must manage.

“Veeam contributes so much to the efficiency of our operations,” said Rosenfeld. “Another example is Veeam’s data portability and the growing support for more hypervisors, which will facilitate our transformation with Microsoft Hyper-V, enabling us to save a huge amount on licensing costs while never compromising on data resilience.”

The IT team at D&S uses the detailed monitoring data from Veeam ONE by integrating the information into its central Icinga monitoring platform. This provides the operations team with deep insights and enables automated workflows.

“The fast, simple, and comprehensive audit-proof reporting enabled by Veeam and Everpure are key building blocks in our effort to fully meet the ISO 27001 standard requirements for information security management systems,” said Rosenfeld. “This is an important step for the IT team at D&S to further increase cybersecurity and also win more external customers.”

The deployment transformed recovery from a prolonged business risk into a rapid, repeatable, proven capability.

“Veeam and Everpure work very well together,” said Rosenfeld. “The combined solution offers us flexibility and very robust protection for our mission-critical systems.”

• Avoids $30 million+ USD in potential loss of revenue
  The combination of Veeam and Everpure storage boosted backup and recovery performance massively. In the past, recovery of the entire IT environment would have taken five and a half months, leading to potential business losses of USD 30 million+. Using Veeam and Everpure, D&S could now recover all VMs and data within just half a day.
• Cuts virtualization licensing costs significantly
  Veeam’s support for multiple hypervisors is helping D&S transition to Microsoft Hyper-V, significantly reducing licensing costs while maintaining data resilience throughout the transformation.
• Delivers effective resilience against cyberthreats
  Comprehensive and fast recovery features in combination with immutable backups reduce the risk of ransomware attacks. D&S can now reliably recover fast with full confidence and demonstrate that ability to auditors.