Jebsen Group builds resilience against cyberattacks with Veeam

The Business Challenge

With a longstanding presence and deep understanding of the Greater China region, Jebsen Group has established itself as a trusted partner to brands entering the Chinese market. Armed with retail and distribution touchpoints and data-driven insights, Jebsen connects more than 200 brands and products with consumers in Greater China.

To fully unlock the power of data, Jebsen Group’s IT team redesigned its legacy ERP infrastructure in 2020 to become more API-driven, so that the business can connect to external partners more easily. However, external connections inevitably expose the enterprise to cybersecurity threats, which could jeopardize business continuity.

Other key IT applications supporting the Group’s retail and distribution business include Point-of Sale (POS), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), e-commerce, HR and finance systems. If these systems go down, the company could lose revenue from failed transactions. To safely protect these business-critical systems and improve its resilience against cybersecurity threats, Jebsen Group needed a reliable backup solution to centralize data protection across the Group.

The Veeam Solution

The adoption of the Veeam Availability Suite helped Jebsen Group standardize its data protection strategy across all offices in Greater China. With Veeam’s ease of use, every office is empowered to perform disaster recovery if the need arises, without relying on one or two IT personnel in the Hong Kong head office. Having a whole team of skilled and vigilant backup experts in every office has instilled greater confidence and peace of mind in the business.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is also another critical piece of Jebsen’s cybersecurity strategy. Knowing that phishing emails are one of the most common entry points of cyberattacks into organizations today, Jebsen Group invested in Veeam’s flagship O365 solution to protect executives’ mailboxes, which enables 24/7 secure access to work emails on personal devices. Without Veeam’s O365 backup solution, if O365 mailboxes were attacked, it would be time-consuming to recover important files and emails, which could affect time-sensitive business decisions. Moving forward, Jebsen is also planning to use Veeam to protect O365 collaboration platforms such as Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive.

“No one can prevent cyberattacks 100%, but early detection is the key,” shared Brian Chan, Information Technology Director at Jebsen Group. “Jebsen has a threestep cybersecurity strategy: identify, contain and restore. Veeam is our answer to the ‘restore’ step. To restore and retain a complete and updated copy of our data, we need to make sure that our backups are successful every day and hour, with regular drill tests to ensure our data is 100% recoverable.”

Veeam helped Jebsen Group to increase the frequency and reliability of backups. On top of traditional daily, weekly and monthly backups, Veeam also enables hourly replication of Jebsen’s production data to its disaster recovery site, so the latest version is at most an hour old. According to Brian, more important than doing backups is disaster recovery drill tests, and Veeam DataLabs allows his team to simulate an isolated environment for testing without affecting the business.

“Before COVID, people thought of disaster recovery as an audit requirement for compliance purposes. But now, cybersecurity threats are real and only increasing. More than just doing backups, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of data recovery tests to validate our backups, and Veeam really helps us with that.” said Brian.

Before using Veeam, Jebsen Group had experienced a cyberattack. While it managed to put together snapshot backups and restore the system, this incident brought home the importance of a data protection. Jebsen now uses Veeam to replicate production data to an isolated network segment so that it always has a clean copy of its data in a separate location to restore from.

Highlighting the role of IT as business enabler, Brian concluded: “Trust and relationships are key in the Chinese business world. Our data protection strategy with Veeam safeguards Jebsen Group’s business data and instills confidence in our clients and business partners. By keeping our data safe and intact, we can make the best decisions for our clients that will drive their growth in this important market.”

The Results

• Built a strong foundation for cybersecurity
  Veeam forms a strong foundation of Jebsen’s data protection strategy with a disaster recovery process, trusted backup and validated restores to minimize data loss in the event of a cyberattack.
• Centralized disaster recovery across Greater China
  With Veeam, Jebsen Group centralized its disaster recovery strategy across all business lines and empowered every office in Greater China to recover data immediately if needed.
• Saved time and achieved optimal SLA
  Since moving from legacy solutions to Veeam, Jebsen Group has achieved 50% faster backups and a Recovery Time Objective of one hour, compared to up to 24 hours previously.