Séquano recovers from a major cybersecurity attack with Veeam

Séquano helps regenerate neighborhoods, transforming existing urban landscapes and old industrial sites into better places for people to live, learn, and work. The company’s role is to orchestrate the work of public authorities and commercial contractors so that complex regeneration projects can proceed smoothly and with minimal disruption to residents. 

Translating a community’s vision into concrete plans and finding and coordinating the appropriate partners to deliver transformations generates huge volumes of documentation. It’s vital for Séquano’s employees to always have access to relevant documents, since urban regeneration projects typically involve the coordination of multiple different partners who perform tasks in a strict sequence. In addition to operational documents, there are large numbers of documents associated with financial, legal, procurement, and communications work — in total, Séquano holds 50 TB of data. 

“Like the conductor of an orchestra, we must coordinate a large number of partners,” said Charlotte Seutin, Chief of Staff at Séquano. “To ensure that our complex projects run smoothly and on budget, we need access to the documentation stored in our virtualized landscape. Equally, in a competitive environment, we need all the right information at our fingertips so that we can bid for and win new projects.”

To enhance availability and protect business-critical data against loss, Séquano engaged OCI IT and Digital to create a mirrored landscape, with Veeam Data Platform and Veeam Cloud Connect providing backup to the cloud.

“We needed a backup solution that would be fast, effective, and capable of assimilating all our data,” said Seutin. “OCI proposed Veeam as a solution that met our needs, and we have certainly seen its value.”

During normal operations, the clustering of Séquano’s servers between two locations enables immediate failover to a working copy if a server unexpectedly goes down. This functionality also enables Séquano and OCI to take servers down for maintenance without disruption to business users. For more serious failures, the backup on OCI’s Cloudéo cloud provides a clean, reliable copy of all data from which Séquano can rebuild its systems. 

The immutability of the Veeam backups proved to be essential when Séquano fell victim to a ransomware cyberattack in January 2024. The IT security system was compromised over the course of a weekend and all data was encrypted by attackers. 

Séquano worked with OCI to put its disaster recovery (DR) plan into action, restoring the complete backed-up environment to an air-gapped system and fully verifying the content. 

“OCI successfully restored our systems from the immutable Veeam backup, verified that the backed-up data was not compromised by the ransomware, and proposed a new reinforced architecture,” said Seutin. “We know that ransomware can mean months of disruption, but with Veeam we were fully back to normal operations in about ten days.”

Séquano knows better than most organizations that no cybersecurity measures are infallible. Equally, cyberattacks are far from the only threat to business continuity: Fires, floods and power cuts can also bring organizations to their knees. When the first line of defense failed, Séquano was able to rely on the skills of OCI as its partner and the quality of its Veeam backup solution.

“Our profession is urban transformation, not IT,” said Seutin. “The value of working with OCI is that they understand our needs and propose the appropriate solutions, helping us make the right decisions and choose the right tools to support business continuity. Our recovery from this major cyberattack was a validation of our choice of both Veeam and OCI.”

• Protects business-critical data with immutable cloud backups
  By storing a locked copy of backups in the cloud, Veeam gives Séquano a proven method to recover its business-critical systems even when all data is inaccessible in its datacenter.
• Enables proven recovery for tens of TBs of data
  With Veeam, Séquano was fully recovered within ten days of what could have been a disastrous ransomware attack.
• Increases resilience and business continuity
  No cybersecurity measures can ever be 100% effective. Veeam provides a safety net for Séquano, helping the company ensure that it can continue to deliver transformational urban regeneration projects.