Dialing up data resilience: One NZ gains confidence in recovery with Veeam

One NZ is revolutionizing connectivity New Zealand, working with Starlink to extend coverage to the 40% of the country that isn’t served by traditional cell towers. Maintaining high service levels and driving innovation requires dependable, 24/7 access to data.

“We are constantly innovating and are aiming to become the most AI-enabled telco in the world,” said Stephen Jessop, Cloud Shared Platforms Dev Ops Manager at One NZ. “At the same time, our satellite service lets customers send messages anywhere in New Zealand with an eligible phone and plan. We also have business critical apps like our billing system, which processes over 2 billion database transactions every year. If this or other business services go down, it could severely impact our profitability and customer trust.”

The One NZ IT team saw an opportunity to ramp up data resilience, reducing the risk of interruptions to the company’s operations. Previously, One NZ backed up data using various vendor’s backup solutions

“In the past, we have had difficulty scheduling regular full backups to prevent them from affecting production performance, and they could take as long as 25 hours to complete,” said Jessop. “We were looking to enhance our cyber security posture with regard to backups”. It could have taken as long as two weeks to recover from our backups, which made us think: what’s the likelihood of success here? It was time for a change.”

One NZ deployed Veeam to support efforts to boost business continuity and cyber resilience. To make its selection, the IT team compared a range of offerings.

“Veeam outshone other vendor offerings with ease of implementation, integration with our virtualized and legacy systems, cost, and quality of support,” said Jessop. “The Veeam roadmap aligns well with our own.”

One NZ protects approximately 120 on-premises business applications and over 2.5 petabytes of data with Veeam Data Platform, including its business-critical billing platforms. The move has transformed the company’s approach to data resilience. By leveraging Veeam, One NZ has strengthened the availability and integrity of its billing operations, ensuring continuous access to real-time billing data and minimizing risk of downtime or data loss.

“One massive benefit is we’re able to create immutable backups with Veeam,” said Jessop. “We create replicas, which are also immutable, take copies of those and store them on different tier storage on-premises. We move the data we want to retain long term, to air gapped physical tape storage, soon to be migrated to public cloud S3 and longer term  Glacier storage. As a result, our confidence in our data resilience has soared to 100%.”

“When our 30 TB DR/Reporting billing system was corrupted, Veeam delivered, fast,” said Jessop. “We recovered our DR/Reporting billing database in 48 hours, which represented a huge improvement on our data recovery timeframe. Previously this would have taken an estimated two and a half weeks and even then, we were unconvinced we could have been successful.”

When One NZ opted to move from an on-premises CRM application to a SaaS based CRM, it chose Veeam Backup to protect the new mission-critical cloud service. Using Veeam, the company has the ability to retain a complete backup of its CRM system, both on private and public cloud.

“With Veeam Backup for our public cloud CRM, we have the ability to keep a copy on premise, so we’re always in command,” said Jessop. “It’s not just about peace of mind. The ability to restore from one CRM Org to another powers our testing and development, helping us move faster and innovate smarter.”

Adopting Veeam has slashed both data backup and recovery times at One NZ, helping the telco increase business continuity dramatically. By integrating insights from built-in Veeam monitoring tools into its Infrastructure monitoring dashboards, the company has unprecedented visibility of data resilience.

“Veeam has had an extraordinary impact on data resilience at One NZ: backups run at least 40% faster, and we can recover our full billing environment in 12 hours rather than weeks,” said Jessop. “We now get Veeam alerts on our infrastructure monitoring dashboards and direct into our incident management platform. That allows us to proactively fix any potential issues and optimize our backup processes.”

Next, One NZ is exploring plans to deploy a backup solution to bring the same level of resilience to containerized applications. “Veeam has been there for us both in tough times and good times. We’re excited at the prospect of giving our developers the ability to back up new containers natively with a solution such as Veeam Kasten,” said Jessop.

• Cut recovery times for One NZ’s entire environment from weeks to 12 hours
  “Veeam saved the day when our 30 TB DR/Reporting billing system was corrupted. We recovered from the production database, which required two full restores and a full backup of production, in just 48 hours. That’s light years ahead of what we could do before,” said Jessop.
• Improved data backup speed by 40%
  With much higher backup performance, One NZ no longer worries about data resilience processes impacting production systems.
• Enabled total confidence in data resilience
  “Backups mean nothing without the ability to recover your data,” said Jessop. “Veeam has given us total confidence in our ability to be data resilient, ensuring we can always provide top-quality services to our customers with total assurance in our data recovery ability.”