SunExpress keeps travelers on-time with data protection and availability from Veeam

SunExpress is propelling an ambitious growth strategy. By 2035, the airline plans to increase its fleet from 77 to 166 aircraft while adding new routes to its network. To manage this growth and secure its reputation for award-winning service, the airline is harnessing the latest technology.

To support its technological solutions, SunExpress embraced a cloud-first strategy, unlocking greater agility and cutting time to market for new services. However, to use these new capabilities to their full potential, the airline realized it needed to update its approach to data protection.

“Without access to data, the airline is practically grounded: we cannot get passengers booked onto flights or aircraft off the runway,” said Cenk Uysal, Systems and Platforms Manager at SunExpress. “From selling tickets to flight schedule planning, crew management, and aircraft maintenance, so many of our processes are time- critical, which means that downtime is simply not an option. We kicked off a search for a powerful solution capable of protecting our data no matter where it was located.”

SunExpress found the answer in Veeam, which offers a single point of control for protection of workloads across the airline’s hybrid cloud environment. The selection process was a painless experience.

“Veeam has been our solution of choice for safeguarding our on-premises virtual machines for a few years now,” said Uysal. “When we realized that we could extend Veeam to protect workloads in Microsoft Azure too, the benefits were immediately obvious. We get the advantages of the same easy- to-use interface that we’re used to, plus the efficiency of using one management console for 360-degree data protection.”

Using Veeam, SunExpress is maximizing the availability of data across its operations. As a result, the airline avoids costly interruptions, benefiting both its bottom line and helping to provide passengers with a seamless travel experience.

“We estimate that just one hour of downtime could cost us upwards of tens of thousands of euros,” said Uysal. “Because Veeam allows us to recover data so quickly, we’ve never failed to meet even our most challenging SLAs for data availability. The result is happier employees and happier passengers.”

SunExpress is also keeping efficiency sky-high with Veeam, ensuring 100% comprehensive data protection for its hybrid cloud environment while maintaining a tight grip on complexity. The airline is taking advantage of built-in security features to ramp up its protection against cyberattacks.

“Veeam gives us total control of data protection for our entire organization,” said Uysal. “It also comes in handy for change management. For example, if we update a system and something goes wrong, we can roll back instantly with Veeam. We use the immutable backup function and store them in other regions within Azure to ensure we’re protected from ransomware and Azure losing servers in one area.”

The future is clearly bright for SunExpress, which is expanding its fleet of aircraft and its technological capabilities. Along the way, it plans to harness the full capabilities of Veeam to minimize risk without stifling innovation.

“We’re planning to use Veeam replication capabilities to migrate data that we must keep within Turkey for operational purposes from our on-premises infrastructure to a local cloud vendor,” said Uysal. “With Veeam solutions, we are committed to safeguarding our critical data assets, essential to our operations. Through our collaboration with Veeam, we will actively explore and implement innovative data protection strategies to ensure the highest level of security and resilience.”

• Helps SunExpress avoid downtime that could incur estimated costs of tens of thousands of Euros per hour. 
  In an airline, every second of inactivity has an impact on the bottom line, customer satisfaction and reputation. Veeam is helping SunExpress soar above the competition.
• 100% success rate at meeting service level agreements around data availability. 
  “Because Veeam allows us to recover data so quickly, we’ve never failed to meet even our most challenging SLAs for data availability,” said Uysal. “The result is happier employees and happier passengers.”
• Offers a single point of control for 100% comprehensive data protection for a hybrid cloud environment. 
  Thanks to Veeam, SunExpress does not need to choose between ensuring rapid access to data 24/7 and keeping its operations simple — instead, the airline benefits from both in droves.