NTT DOCOMO reduces data resilience costs by 80% with Veeam

NTT DOCOMO has long connected millions of people in Japan with reliable, high-performance telecommunications services. Now, the company is extending its pioneering outlook to new sectors such as financial services.

“Through our Smart Life offerings, we aim to enrich people’s lives in multiple ways,” said Kosuke Yamamoto, Manager Information Systems Department at NTT DOCOMO. “As well as mobile services, we’re also offering credit cards and QR code payments, for example.”

To support the latest phase in its evolution, NTT DOCOMO initiated an enterprise-wide digital transformation. As part of this effort, the company opted for a cloud-first strategy and began phasing out its on-premises IT infrastructure. NTT DOCOMO’s previous data protection solution was failing to deliver on cost-efficiency or reliability.

“We are in the middle of a transition from on-premises to the cloud,” said Kosuke Yamamoto. “We currently have over 100 million customers with whom we need to ensure the highest level of trust. Our customers know us for being reliable, so it was vital that we protected our data and business continuity during every step of our digital transformation journey. We wanted a solution that worked equally as well with cloud and on-premises systems, and that offered a better price-performance ratio and greater peace of mind than our existing tool.”

NTT DOCOMO selected Veeam to protect its data no matter where it is located, helping the company maintain high business continuity even as it expands into new markets.

“Veeam delivers seamless data protection across cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments, which is exactly what we were looking for,” said Kosuke Yamamoto. “Veeam gives us the flexibility to pursue our digital transformation goals with the confidence that we have the proper safeguards in place. Another factor in our decision to use Veeam was the total cost of ownership — we were impressed by the competitive pricing and cost-efficiency it offers.”

With Veeam Data Platform, NTT DOCOMO backs up data across its remaining on-premises systems and its growing cloud environment. The company is using Veeam to maximize utilization of resources via built-in performance optimization features.

“We estimate that Veeam has driven down our data protection costs by 80%,” said Kosuke Yamamoto. “Much of this is down to how much more effectively it uses our backup infrastructure through features such as deduplication.”

NTT DOCOMO is also using Veeam to empower its developers to clone environments for testing purposes — helping to accelerate innovation.

“We give developers access to Veeam to make copies of systems and data for testing,” said Kosuke Yamamoto. “Because developers can now create test environments themselves, our transformation is proceeding much faster. It also increases the quality of our deliverables, because our developers can test them using the latest production data.”

The NTT DOCOMO team carries out regular recovery tests to ensure that its data protection standards remain high as the company diversifies and adapts to new market conditions. When the team has a question, they know they can contact Veeam for help.

“We no longer worry about data loss in the event of an incident such as a server failure, and this is because of Veeam,” said Kosuke Yamamoto. “Veeam has never failed to respond quickly and kindly whenever I’ve reached out to them with a query. Going forward, we’re increasing our focus on security even more, which aligns with the Veeam roadmap, so we feel Veeam is a vendor we can rely on for years to come.”

• 80% reduction in data protection costs
  With lower costs alongside comprehensive backup coverage, NTT DOCOMO can pursue its digital transformation plans with confidence.
• Drives down the risk of data loss to near zero
  “We no longer worry about data loss in the event of an incident such as a server failure, and this is because of Veeam,” said Kosuke Yamamoto.
• Accelerates innovation by enabling developers to clone data for testing
  By enabling developers to self-serve copies of the latest data with Veeam, NTT DOCOMO can bring exciting new services to customers faster.