No Downtime, No Problem: EPL Runs 24/7 with Data Resilience from Veeam

EPL Limited’s packaging solutions are found in homes all over the world, containing everything from toothpaste to honey. Every year, the company produces more than six billion plastic tubes for some of the world’s biggest brands — most of which require just-in-time deliveries from their suppliers.

EPL runs 20 manufacturing facilities across more than ten countries in multiple time zones. For operations on this global scale, downtime is simply not an option. Core systems must remain available at all times. Equally, EPL must protect itself against the growing threat of malware, which has the potential to halt or delay manufacturing and cause  EPL to miss critical customer deadlines with its customers.

“For example, if our SAP ERP system went down, even for a few hours, production would come to a halt,” said Sudeep Maydeo, Head of IT and CISO at EPL Limited. “This would have a damaging knock-on effect on our supply chain, leading to missed deliveries, costly materials wastage, and downstream disruption for our clients. Even a small amount of downtime could easily result in reputational damage, client dissatisfaction and financial losses.”

These requirements make data resilience a must-have for EPL. However, the company’s existing data protection platform was struggling to deliver fast, failsafe backup and recovery.

Managing multiple different backup agents and hardware for different systems was complex and time-consuming.  Recovering data was a complex, multi-step process that could take hours—or even days—for a single server. Backups of the mission-critical SAP ERP application regularly took around 72 hours to complete. More concerningly, when Maydeo and his team recently tried to recover from these backups, the process failed. Unwilling to accept this risk, EPL set out to find a solution capable of delivering enterprise-class data resilience. 

To enable business continuity and keep production lines running 24/7, EPL chose Veeam to deliver unprecedented data resilience. Through Veeam Data Platform and Veeam Data Cloud Vault, the company replaced agent-based approaches with more efficient, image-based backups of entire virtual machines.

“Veeam checked all the boxes for us during the competitive analysis, with features such as instant data recovery, simplified management, immutable backups and automated backup verification,” said Maydeo. “Their universal licensing model was also a strong selling point. Given that we manage more than 300 TB of data and are experiencing data growth of 16-18% annually, Veeam’s scalable model was much more commercially attractive. In fact, Veeam’s universal licensing model has saved us more than $56,000 in capital expenditure.”

EPL relies on Veeam to protect an extensive operational environment, including on-premises servers, virtual machines (VMs), end location hubs, SAP ERP, SQL databases, Active Directory, file servers, DNS, DHCP, and homegrown business applications.  Crucially, Veeam’s hardware agnosticism means that EPL can maintain a diverse hardware environment and manage it all from a single platform without vendor lock-in or scaling limitations.

“Veeam is ultra-flexible,” said Maydeo. “We’re not locked into a particular hardware vendor and are free to choose whatever systems work best for us.”

The company backs up all workloads daily and takes additional hourly snapshots of Tier 1 applications such as SAP ERP, minimizing potential data loss in a disaster scenario. With Veeam, EPL creates four data backups: a production copy, stored at its main datacenter, a tape copy, a disaster recovery copy, synced from production VMs and stored off-site, and a cloud copy. Veeam communicates directly with EPL’s hypervisors, including VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, to perform efficient, agentless, image-level backups of entire virtual machines.

“We have fully adopted Veeam’s 3-2-1-1-0 rule — three copies of data, two different media, one off-site, one immutable, and zero backup errors through automated verification,” said Maydeo. “As a result, we’ve achieved a 99.9% backup success rate, eliminated restore failures in testing, and significantly strengthened our resilience against malware threats.”

“Veeam Vault plays a critical role in this strategy by providing secure, immutable storage that’s air-gapped from the production environment. It ensures that even in the event of a sophisticated malware attack, our backups remain untouched and recoverable,” said Maydeo.

EPL’s rigorous data resilience strategy was put to the ultimate test two months ago, when it experienced a cyber-attack. The cyber-attack affected 2 VM’s and was identified quickly. The IT team was able to fully restore the affected machines in just four hours, with zero data loss and zero disruption to the business. The team recovered so effectively that when employees arrived at the office on Monday, they weren’t even aware anything had happened.

Crucially, EPL was not just able to recover quickly, but confidently, because of Veeam SureBackup and automated verification.

“Veeam goes beyond simple visibility to provide us with real observability,” said Maydeo. “We can test and confirm that backups are recoverable, moving from hope to certainty. This has resulted in 100% verified recoverability during recovery drills, eliminating the risk of corrupted backups. Together with air-gapped storage, Veeam has cut our malware recovery time by up to 80% compared to legacy solutions. Veeam gives us peace of mind like nothing else.”

EPL plans to introduce Veeam ONE to take advantage of advanced capabilities, including real-time monitoring and proactive threat detection through Veeam Threat Center.

"Our experience with Veeam has been incredibly positive, and we're excited about what lies ahead,” said Maydeo. “Veeam not only simplifies backup, it also strengthens cybersecurity and compliance. We have fewer failures, faster recovery, and more IT time freed for innovation. It’s not just an IT tool, it’s a strategic investment in business continuity.”

• Delivers $56,000+ savings through flexible universal licensing
  "Given data growth of 16-18% annually, Veeam’s flexible licensing model has saved us more than $56,000 in capital expenditure,” said Sudeep Maydeo. “A 25% reduction in data protection administration is saving us a further $11,000+ in operational costs. We can redirect these savings toward strategic investments in IT infrastructure and cybersecurity initiatives."
• Cuts backup times by 40% and RTO by 70%
  It takes hours, not days, to back up critical SAP systems. And Veeam Instant Recovery makes it possible to simultaneously recover multiple workloads immediately — helping to deliver the 24/7 availability that global manufacturing demands.
• Recovered from cyber-attack in just 4 hours
  The team was able to recover from a cyber-attack in just 4 hours. Thanks to a data resilience mind set and proactive testing, EPL has gained speed and predictability when recovering data and systems. In addition to reducing potential business impact, this gives senior leaders huge confidence in the IT team’s ability to protect the company’s core information assets during significant incidents.