EECO cuts costs and complexity with Veeam's cyber-resilient solutions

EECO powers successful manufacturing plants, machine builders and construction teams by providing the electrical parts that help these organizations thrive.

“We are committed to offering our customers the very best products at competitive prices,” said Rod Vieiradarosa, Director of IT Operations at Electrical Equipment Company (EECO). “As a result, the margins in our business are extremely tight and we’re always looking for ways to operate more efficiently, whether that’s on the warehouse floor or in the back office.”

As part of its efficiency drive, EECO is aiming to become a more data-driven organization. So, the company is investing in new analytics and automation solutions. This is further increasing the importance of data protection at EECO.

“Data protection is a big priority for us,” said Vieiradarosa. “Any delays to accessing data could slow down deliveries to our customers and drive up the cost of doing business. So, we do everything we can to avoid downtime for our IT systems. When we saw a chance to ramp up our data protection measures and rationalize our IT suppliers at the same time, we grabbed it with both hands.”

EECO selected Veeam as its data protection vendor of choice, since Veeam could ensure that EECO employees could access essential product, sales, and customer information whenever they need it.

“We moved from Zerto to Veeam CDP-based VM replication and the difference was obvious immediately,” said Vieiradarosa. “Straight away, we saw the cost and complexity associated with data protection drop significantly, as well as the administrative burden on our IT team. Our use of Zerto was through a web portal from a server co-location facility, which meant that in a disaster we would have to spin up virtual servers in their private cloud and pay per hour. That made DR an unknown cost and made fail back more complicated. Veeam is more of an any-to-any tool, which is a great advantage.”

EECO now uses Veeam Data Platform to back up all on-premises systems to its disaster recovery (DR) site before replicating selected backups to the Wasabi cloud. As part of its annual DR testing, EECO checks it can restore various workloads with Veeam.

“We have a 100% success rate in restoring data from our on-premises systems with Veeam,” said Vieiradarosa. “I don’t know of any solution that can match Veeam for this use case. The price point of other tools such as Rubrik is so much higher, and they don’t maintain the same pace of innovation as Veeam.”

To protect its business-critical Microsoft 365 environment, EECO became the first company in the U.S. to deploy Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365, a BaaS offering.

“We recently went all-in on Microsoft 365,” said Vieiradarosa. “All our file storage is now within Microsoft Teams, and most of our customer communications happen via Outlook. We tried everything under the sun to back up our Microsoft 365 data, from Backupify to Druva but when we realized that we could consolidate to Veeam and deal with one less vendor, it was an easy choice.”

EECO now benefits from on-tap Veeam support for the protection of both its on-premises and Microsoft 365 environments. EECO looks forward to benefiting from the Veeam culture of continuous improvement as part of their data protection landscape too.

“Veeam just gets it,” said Vieiradarosa. “Their core values align with ours. We’ve never felt that we’ve become a commodity as a customer. It’s crucial for us to have rapid access to support, and that’s what we get from Veeam.”

As EECO continues to improve its offering to customers, Veeam is proving an invaluable tool in supporting the company’s development.

“If we upgrade some software and it goes sideways, Veeam allows us to rollback instantly,” said Vieiradarosa. “Scenarios like this are where Veeam really shines. It’s also a key part of our cyber resiliency strategy since we can use Veeam to recover from cloud backups in a worst-case scenario. Whatever workloads or tools we consider next, using Veeam to protect them is a given.”

• Decreases cost and complexity for data protection, providing rapid returns on IT investments.
  “Using Veeam for data protection allows us to concentrate on what we excel at: Bringing the right electrical components to our customers at the right price point,” said Vieiradarosa. “Veeam helps us to keep our business running cost-effectively with minimal interruption.”
• Saves time and effort by consolidating to a single vendor for data protection for on-premises and Microsoft 365 environments.
  EECO succeeded in rationalizing its IT suppliers by standardizing on Veeam as its data protection solution of choice, streamlining support and licensing.
• 100% success rate in restoring on-premises data helps to ensure around-the-clock business continuity.
  “Veeam has never failed to restore any of our on-premises workloads on demand,” said Vieiradarosa. “That sort of track record gives us confidence we’ve selected the right data protection solution to support EECO in going onto bigger and better things.”