Data resilience from Veeam protects IKK Group of Companies from multi-million-dollar downtime risks

With over 18,000 employees and workers across 40 companies, IKK Group is on a mission to build the infrastructure of the future in alignment with Saudi Vision 2030. The company is involved in large-scale specialized construction projects across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East and North Africa region, including the innovative Jeddah Corniche Formula 1 Circuit, Riyadh Metro Project, Abu Dhabi Louvre Museum, King Abdullah Financial District, NEOM projects, and many other mega projects in the Kingdom and Middle East.

The Group is growing rapidly, opening an average of three new subsidiaries annually in recent years. Behind the scenes, IKK Group has scaled out its shared IT services to keep pace. Over the last five years, the Group’s total volume of data has shot up from 40 TB to approximately 120 TB, a 300% increase.

IKK Group’s centralized IT department plays a key role in the company’s expansion, ensuring that every business unit has access to business applications and data. In total, the department delivers shared services to over 5,000 office users and around 13,000 field workers.

“In the construction sector, any project delays can drive costs dramatically,” said Ayman Mansour, IT Infrastructure Department Manager at IKK Group. “For example, unplanned downtime to our IT systems could cost the business the equivalent of almost five million dollars a day in a worst-case scenario. Protecting our data and ensuring continuous operations isn’t just a priority — it’s a necessity.”

A few years ago, IKK Group saw that its legacy data protection solution was struggling to keep up with its growing business. Frequent errors and glitches when restoring from backups, coupled with a lack of responsive, local support from the previous backup solution vendor, left the IT team stretched thin.

“We decided to seize the opportunity to streamline our approach to data protection,” said Mansour. “The aim was to enhance our disaster recovery capabilities and establish a long-term partnership with a trusted vendor.”

After a thorough evaluation of the data protection market, IKK Group selected Veeam to strengthen its data protection strategy and help ensure business continuity amid rapid growth.

“Veeam offered capabilities that most other vendors we considered simply couldn’t match, including seamless integration with our VMware infrastructure and a highly cost-effective licensing model,” said Mansour. “With Veeam, we get straightforward scalability at a predictable cost, which is a massive advantage as our business data continues to grow.”

IKK Group uses Veeam Data Platform to protect critical applications such as Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft SQL Server, following the 3-2-1-1-0 rule to ensure data resilience. The Group replicates more than 200 virtual machines across HPE StoreOnce appliances at its primary data center and the disaster recovery site, with a third copy stored offline in an air-gapped storage appliance. Business-critical data is backed up every few hours, while other systems are on weekly or monthly backup schedules.

“With Veeam, we can verify the integrity of our backups, which gives us much greater confidence in our disaster recovery capabilities,” Mansour said. “We also use immutable backups from Veeam, which help reduce any exposure to ransomware risks.”

The Group leverages powerful analytics and monitoring tools from Veeam ONE to optimize storage capacity planning and maintain compliance. “Veeam ONE helps us streamline our auditing and compliance processes,” Mansour said. “The level of visibility we get from the solution is of a great value; it’s a key indicator for storage capacity planning.”

When the group decided to move to Microsoft 365, IKK Group opted to build on its partnership with Veeam to protect the new cloud services. With Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365, the team replaced manual backup configurations and tasks with highly automated workflows.

“To meet our internal service-level agreements, we needed to recover our Microsoft 365 data around 20% faster than the solution’s native backup capabilities would allow,” said Mansour. “Initially, we provisioned backup servers in Microsoft Azure and manually configured the Veeam backup jobs ourselves. With Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365, we’ve replaced time-consuming configurations with a simple, user-friendly console — reducing manual work by 25% and cutting cloud storage costs by 20%. We can now use the time saved to focus on other important tasks, such as capacity planning and exploring security-hardening features.”

The story of this successful partnership is still being written: IKK Group is continuing to explore Veeam’s evolving suite of solutions to strengthen its cybersecurity posture and business continuity strategy. “We’re working closely with Veeam team to explore solutions to further improve our approach to data protection,” said Mansour. “Looking ahead, we’re very interested to leverage AI capabilities to boost the availability and security of business-critical data.”

• Cuts recovery time objective for Microsoft 365 data by 20%
  “With Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365, we can rapidly restore user data to meet our stringent internal service-level agreements,” said Mansour.
• Streamlines Microsoft 365 backups, reducing manual work by 25%
  IKK Group has eliminated manual, multi-step backup workflows to protect its Microsoft 365 data, saving valuable time that its team can now spend on activities such as capacity planning and exploring security-hardening features.
• Reduces storage costs by 20%
  “With Backup-as-a-Service from Veeam, we no longer need to provision our own storage — delivering a substantial cost-saving,” said Mansour.