OTP banka trusts Veeam to safeguard its Microsoft 365 data

OTP banka strives to deliver high-quality banking experiences through every channel, including online, mobile and in-branch touchpoints. Part of the international OTP Group, the organization serves hundreds of thousands of customers across Serbia.

For OTP banka, digital collaboration plays a key role in service delivery. Employees throughout the business make heavy use of email to drive dayto- day operations, including customer services, regulatory reporting and more.

Stevica Ćurčić, Head of IT Governance Department at OTP banka, said: “Over the years, our Microsoft Exchange environment has grown steadily with the business. Today, we have approximately 10 TB of data across more than 3,000 mailboxes.”

In the past, OTP banka ran Microsoft Exchange Server at its on-premises data center. However, the growing volume of inbox data made protecting the environment increasingly complex and costly.

The bank’s legacy backup tool required significant manual work to manage, and the organization’s storage needs were rising year by year.

“Our regulator requires us to keep most data for a minimum of ten years,” said Ćurčić. “If we continued to host our email inboxes on premises, we knew that our costs would increase substantially in the long term. So, we decided to look for a fresh approach.”

OTP banka saw that moving to Microsoft 365 would enable it to scale back its on-premises infrastructure. However, the native backup capabilities of the solution fell short of the bank’s stringent data protection requirements.

To solve the challenge, OTP banka selected Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365. A cloud-native, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, Veeam provides data protection for the bank’s Microsoft Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business data.

“We ran an RFP process to assess a number of leading vendors, and Veeam came out on top,” said Ćurčić. “Some of the other providers we considered were unable to offer direct-to-cloud backups, so we quickly ruled them out because of our network bandwidth limitations. By contrast, the Veeam solution is powered by Microsoft 365 Backup Storage, which means we can protect all our Microsoft 365 accounts without bringing any of the data back on premises.”

Working with a local Veeam partner, OTP banka configured the new solution to protect its new Microsoft 365 environment.

“The onboarding process for Veeam was very, very easy,” said Ćurčić. “We performed the initial configuration work ourselves in under an hour, and then had a short remote session with a Veeam expert to set up our backup policies. In less than a day, everything was up and running smoothly.”

OTP banka now uses Veeam to regularly back up its Microsoft 365 data. All data is now retained for a minimum of ten years, helping the organization to meet its compliance requirements.

“Not only is our Microsoft 365 data protected for more a decade, it’s also immutable — meaning that it cannot be changed after it is written,” said Ćurčić. “In a world where ransomware threats are becoming more common all the time, we get great peace of mind knowing that we can always recover our Microsoft 365 data with Veeam.”

As well as enabling it to unlock the benefits of cloud, Veeam has helped OTP banka reduce the time spent on data protection activities.

“With Veeam, we can restore entire mailboxes at the touch of a button,” said Ćurčić. “Compared to our previous on-premises backup tool, Veeam reduces our recovery time objective by 40% and our recovery point objective by 20%. In the future, we plan to set up self-service for our users, enabling them to perform simple recovery actions even faster without help from IT.”

Looking ahead, OTP banka plans to expand its use of Veeam to protect other cloud services and onpremises environments.

• Provides 10+ years of data retention with unlimited storage
  Operating in a highly regulated industry, OTP banka must retain email correspondence for a minimum of 10 years. “Veeam makes it very easy for us to create reports on our Microsoft 365 backups to demonstrate our compliance,” said Ćurčić.
• Mitigates ransomware risks with service-level immutability
  OTP banka stores incremental backups of its Microsoft 365 apps that cannot be modified after they are created, helping to ensure that it always has a clean data copy to restore from in the event of a cyberattack.
• Reduces RTO by 40% and RPO by 20%
  With Veeam, OTP banka can recover entire mailboxes rapidly — helping to ensure that key information is always available to its business users.