Isuzu Motors South Africa protects revenues with data resilience and ransomware protection from Veeam

In 2017, General Motors (GM) divested from South Africa during a global restructuring process. Isuzu Motors purchased GM’s manufacturing facility and GM’s share in Isuzu Truck South Africa. IMSAF was born.

One of the top priorities during the divestiture was for IMSAF to build its own IT infrastructure. GM had provided IT services from the United States during the joint venture, so now it was up to IMSAF to support the business.

IMSAF turned to Dimension Data for help. “We chose Dimension Data because they have the skills and staff to bring together the world’s best technologies, and for us that includes SAP,” said Loren Meyer, CIO at IMSAF. “Dimension Data built us a robust IT infrastructure. They also highlighted a big risk with our legacy backup tool, which was no longer able to adequately protect our SAP business systems.”

For IMSAF, even a relatively short period of ERP application downtime can lead to signficant lost revenues. So, protecting this mission-critical system was a top priority.

“Our legacy backup tool was slow to recover our SAP database; during tests, it sometimes took hours or even days to get access to our data,” Meyer said. “Data related to automotive parts and vehicle information is integral to our production facilities. Without that information, we can’t sell to our dealers or customers, and dealers can’t order parts from our warehouses. If we had continued using our legacy backup system, I have no doubt our revenue streams would have suffered.”

To ensure non-stop availability of business-critical SAP data, IMSAF replaced its legacy backup tool with Veeam. With Veeam, IMSAF can back up its SAP database and logs using native SAP tools, simplifying management and assuring transaction consistency.

“One of the biggest benefits of using Veeam is being able to recover SAP data instantly,” Meyer said. “Practically all the business decisions we make are driven by SAP, and Veeam helps us make sure it’s always accessible.”

Today, IMSAF uses Veeam to back up 78.5 TB across 135 virtual machines. The company stores backups on-premises and replicates production data to a secondary site, enabling immediate failover in a recovery scenario.

“Veeam protects our revenue streams by radically reducing the risk of downtime,” Meyer said. “We’ve cut our recovery time objective by more than 99%, which helps us ensure that our SAP systems are always available. That means we have access to the critical data that enables us to do business with dealers and customers — without delay or interruption. Vehicle sales grew by 32% between 2018 and 2024, and Veeam supported that growth.”

IMSAF has now used Veeam to protect its mission-critical data for over five years, and the company continues to build on its disaster recovery capabilities. Working closely with Dimension Data, the company deployed an additional storage repository for long-term archiving, as well as an immutable backup server to help reduce its exposure to cyber risks.

“The threat landscape is constantly evolving, so we are always looking for better ways to protect ourselves,” said Tim Niekerk, IT Operations Manager at IMSAF. “For example, we have deployed a cyber response solution and security operations center, as well as rolling out multi-factor authentication across our endpoints. In recent years, ransomware has become increasingly prevalent. To mitigate the risk of ransomware attacks, we use immutable backups from Veeam to help ensure we have a clean copy of our data to restore from in a disaster scenario.”

Capabilities such as immutable backups also help to strengthen IMSAF’s compliance with regulatory requirements such as South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information (POPI) Act. With end-to-end AES 256-bit encryption, Veeam helps ensure that every backup is protected against unauthorized access.

“Veeam makes our data protection and disaster recovery processes extremely efficient and effective,” Meyer said. “It’s easy to see why Veeam is a leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions. That’s one of the reasons we knew Veeam would be right for us.”

• Protects revenue by recovering SAP data in minutes—99% faster
  “Our business runs on SAP,” Meyer said. “Today, we don’t have to worry about SAP going offline because Veeam helps us make sure it’s always available. That’s why Veeam is such a vital part of our IT infrastructure.”
• Enables near-instant failover for seamless business continuity
  “Thanks to Veeam, we can replicate production data to our DR site in near-real time,” Meyer said. “If we ever need to recover our SAP systems, Veeam will help us minimize our recovery time objective and keep the business running smoothly.”
• Defends against ransomware risks with immutable backups
  By enabling immutable backups with Veeam, IMSAF gains the peace of mind that it can restore to a clean version of its data in the event of a cyberattack. “Immutable backups are another way we demonstrate our compliance with requirements such as the POPI Act,” said Niekerk.