Seven Network keeps 17 million Australians on the edge of their seats with data protection across multiple cloud platforms from Veeam

Seven Network began life in the late 1950s as a small group of independent television stations. Today, Seven has risen to become Australia’s highest-rated network, and a veritable media powerhouse.

It’s no small feat to keep a finger on the pulse of what audiences want in programming year after year. To make it happen, Seven counts on more than 2,200 full-time employees and hundreds more part-time staff. These people all need reliable, round-the-clock access to business systems and data — not just broadcast and programming platforms, but also a host of administrative systems, plus industry-specific applications for audience analytics, advertising purchasing, media monitoring and more.

“Much of the data we manage is used by the business to inform programming schedules, advertising and marketing strategies and media selection,” said Matt Hankinson, Infrastructure Manager at Seven Network. “Losing access to it would severely impact Seven’s ability to make sound decisions and maintain our competitive edge.”

These systems are spread across a highly distributed IT environment. In addition to two main data centers in Sydney and Canberra, Seven hosts infrastructure at 15 locations all over Australia. More recently, hybrid cloud has also come into the mix, with data and applications hosted across an array of public and private cloud platforms.

“No matter where it resides, this data is vital to the smooth running of Seven’s operations,” said Hankinson. “It’s essential that it remains properly protected and readily available to users across the business at all times.”

For nearly a decade, Seven has trusted Veeam technology to provide flexible data protection across its vast estate of applications, storage systems and cloud platforms.

 “Veeam was introduced before I arrived in my current role,” said Hankinson. “At the time, Seven was relying on a very traditional backup and recovery strategy, which depended almost exclusively on tape backups. They wanted to modernize, with a solution that could plug directly into their virtualization platform at the time. Veeam proved to be the right fit for those initial requirements — and it’s stood the test of time, evolving with us as we’ve grown.”

Today, Seven counts on Veeam to provide comprehensive backup and replication for key administrative and business systems, plus network and identity services. Veeam backs up more than 400 VMs and 500TB of data to on-premises HPE StoreOnce appliances, which replicates to off-site cloud storage for disaster recovery.

With Veeam, Seven has simplified backup across its highly distributed operations. Data from the company’s 15 regional sites is now backed up to a data center in Canberra, with secondary copies hosted off-site on Amazon Web Services (AWS). For Seven’s metropolitan sites, a primary copy of backup data goes to the Sydney data center, before copies are moved off-site to the cloud via high-speed links.

“Veeam has made the whole backup process a lot easier to manage across all our locations,” said Hankinson. “It's a big improvement from the days when we needed someone local to punch in a tape, then worry about getting tapes picked up at the scheduled hours and safely transferred to backup sites.”

Seven backs up data from all systems at least once every 24 hours and uses snapshotting — sometimes on an hourly basis — for its most critical systems. Most backups are retained for a minimum of 30 days, with longer-term retention policies for other data. The company tests its restoration capabilities every few months. In most cases, Seven is able to achieve a recovery time objective (RTO) of under four hours.

Seven is steadily expanding its use of cloud-based applications, which includes Microsoft 365 collaboration solutions. To ensure that this data is fully protected, the company uses Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 to protect around 256TB of data across Microsoft Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams applications. 

“Having the additional protection from Veeam for our business-critical Microsoft 365 services gives us great peace of mind,” said Hankinson. “Veeam gives us more control over our data, so we can focus on keeping the network running smoothly.”

What’s more, because Veeam is platform agnostic, Seven also has full control over where it chooses to keep data backups.

Hankinson said: “We’re currently storing our Microsoft 365 backups on AWS due to commercial alignment. We also know that we can always pick up and move to another cloud if needed, thanks to Veeam. It gives us great flexibility for the future.”

• Saves IT team two hours weekly on checking backups, releasing more time for value-added work.
  Veeam drives Seven’s backup success rate to near-100% and provides instant visibility of backup performance, freeing the company’s IT team to focus on delivering the latest insights to decision-makers.
• Simplifies backup of 500TB of data, spread across dozens of locations.
  “Veeam is a very comprehensive solution, and it’s also very easy to use,” said Hankinson. “I think you could take any engineer with some sort of backup experience, sit them down at a console and they’d be able to pick up how Veeam works in no time.”
• Provides a single point of control for protecting a hybrid multicloud environment.
  “We have workloads in practically every cloud known to man,” said Hankinson. “I love the fact that we can use the same Veeam licenses to protect all of our workloads, no matter where they are. This flexibility makes it so much easier to keep up with changes in the business.”