KPMG Lower Gulf deploys Veeam to enhance data resilience and facilitate data growth

The KPMG mission statement is to turn knowledge and understanding of information, industries and business trends into value for its firms' clients, its people and the capital markets. To meet this goal, KPMG Lower Gulf cannot afford interruptions or delays to employees accessing data.

“We support employees across three locations with IT services,” said Mahboob Ahmad, IT Infrastructure Services, KPMG Lower Gulf. “Our data profile is huge and it’s growing rapidly. If anything goes wrong, users expect us to recover data as fast as possible so they can continue their work. With our prior data protection solution this was challenging.”

Previously, KPMG Lower Gulf used a combination of tools, which wasn’t a sustainable approach. Each day, a member of the Infrastructure Services team had to manually change over tapes. To recover data, employees first had to identify the right tape, before carrying out large-scale restores even if the desired data was only a single file.

KPMG Lower Gulf selected Veeam to enable secure, scalable, high-performance data protection for its hybrid cloud infrastructure. By speeding up data backup and recovery, Veeam helps the company ensure data is available for users 24/7, driving responsive service for clients. Today, KPMG Lower Gulf uses Veeam to protect most of its on-premises and Microsoft Azure environments.

“Ranging from Veeam’s built-in security features to ultra-responsive support, it was the right choice for our primary data protection solution going forward.” said Ahmad. “The ability to seamlessly manage data protection across a hybrid cloud environment with Veeam is a significant advantage. We also have no doubts that Veeam can scale alongside our data, so nothing can constrain our growth.”

KPMG Lower Gulf now stores backups of on- premises data on an ExaGrid storage array, while Microsoft Azure backups are stored in the cloud. The move allowed the company to save time and accelerate data recovery dramatically.

“We’ve never failed to recover data with Veeam — not once,” said Ahmad. “The process is also so much faster now. Veeam gives us granular recovery capabilities, so we can pull up a single file rather than restoring an entire virtual server.”

To improve its cyber-resilience measures, KPMG Lower Gulf adopted immutable and encrypted backups from Veeam. The company is also taking advantage of built-in deduplication and compression features to save on storage costs.

“Every time we upgrade to a new version of Veeam we benefit from great new features,” said Ahmad. “Most recently, we’ve added a new malware detection release to our cyber-resilience capabilities. By combining Veeam with ExaGrid, we maximize storage efficiency for our backup infrastructure.”

Thanks to Veeam, KPMG Lower Gulf has gained comprehensive insight into its backup environment. The Infrastructure Services team is also delighted by 24/7 access to Veeam support.

• Scales seamlessly to accommodate data growing rapidly hosted in a hybrid cloud infrastructure. 
  “We have no doubts that Veeam can scale alongside our data, so nothing can constrain our growth,” said Ahmad. “It also works perfectly with data hosted on premises or in the cloud, supporting our hybrid cloud strategy.”
• 100% success rate when recovering data and slashed recovery times down to minutes. 
  By driving down the risk of data loss to near- zero and accelerating data recovery, Veeam is helping KPMG Lower Gulf maintain a high level of business continuity.
• Reduces storage costs with a deduplication ratio of 7:1. 
  “Using Veeam, we can use our storage resources much more efficiently with no impact on performance,” said Ahmad. “As a result, we enjoy better data protection capabilities while controlling costs.”