Powering critical infrastructure: TEAG secured 1,000+ systems with Veeam

Households and businesses across Germany rely on TEAG Thüringer Energie AG (TEAG) for a wide range of essential utility services. Alongside its core business of supplying electricity, natural gas, heating, and water, the innovative organization is working with research institutions to support the transition to green energy and building a fast-growing network of 1,000 public charging points for electric vehicles.

“Many parts of our infrastructure are considered critical,” said Maik Mascher, IT Infrastructure at TEAG. “As a result, radical resilience, high security and reliable, streamlined IT processes are key requirements.”

As TEAG evolved its IT landscape to meet new challenges, it added new hypervisors. To satisfy its needs around data availability, integrity, and security while controlling complexity, the organization looked for a single solution to protect workloads across a diverse environment.

“Our goal was to consolidate our resiliency architecture to make life easier for the IT team, while enabling us to proactively drive innovation and implement best practices,” said Mascher.

TEAG partnered with local expert IBYKUS AG to expand and optimize its Veeam deployment, modernizing data protection and supporting innovation. Veeam’s flexible platform enabled TEAG to protect 1,000+ virtual machines and over 100+ TB of data on its new Nutanix solution .

“We’re continuously optimizing our resilience together with IBYKUS and Veeam,” said Mascher. “IBYKUS provide insightful recommendations and proven experience getting the best out of Veeam solutions, helping us maximize the protection, security and reliability of our mission-critical systems.”

For TEAG, a key benefit of working with Veeam is the non-stop innovation and addition of new features that help the company to adopt new technologies and future-proof its IT.

Lukas Zimmermann, System Administrator Virtualization at TEAG, said: “Support of multiple hypervisors and portability of workloads is vital to us. With Veeam, we can cover all our business needs, including off-site replication, and VMware and Nutanix virtualization. We can even use Veeam to integrate new platforms seamlessly into our IT landscape in the future.”

Through Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes, the organization protects its containerized applications reliably and easily through a single point of control and advanced features. The move reduces complexity and enables modern cloud-native best practices such as DevOps processes and GitOps deployments.

“By combining the latest version of Veeam with an infrastructure upgrade, we boosted backup performance by up to 20%,” said Mascher. “This helps us to manage growth in systems and data volumes, and prevent backup processes from affecting production performance.”

To protect its business-critical productivity and collaboration tools, TEAG chose Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365. By creating local backup copies of cloud data with Veeam Data Platform, the organization supports data sovereignty.

“Every Veeam solution we deploy has proven to be intuitive and easy to use,” said Mascher. “This helps us to handle support requests from our colleagues quickly to minimize interruptions to their work. Veeam plays a part in ensuring TEAG runs like a well-oiled machine.”

TEAG is now taking advantage of Veeam’s Technical Account Manager (TAM) Services, to proactively enhance its resilience processes even further and drive innovation. As part of this initiative, the company is planning to automate recovery and test processes using Veeam Recovery Orchestrator, boosting confidence and facilitating compliance.

“We’re excited to engage with the TAM more closely,” said Mascher. “Also, on our roadmap is using the powerful GenAI insights and real-time data observability provided by Veeam ONE and Veeam Threat Center. With more advanced monitoring features, we’ll be able to identify anomalies quicker and take advantage of early detection of malicious activity across our IT environment to lift cybersecurity to the next level.”

• Safeguards 1,000+ virtual machines and 100+ TB of data
  TEAG uses Veeam to protect mission-critical SAP ERP applications, SAP HANA databases, asset management solutions and many other operational systems to keep power plants, its electric grid and its gas network running smoothly at all times.
• Flexible resilience across multiple infrastructure architectures, hypervisors and management platforms
  “Portability of data and applications is a key advantage for us,” said Mascher. “We’ve just deployed Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure to benefit from more predictable virtualization costs. We’re now moving towards more containerized operations with OpenShift Platform. We have no doubt Veeam will support us wherever we decide to take our IT environment next.”
• Aligned operations with proven best practices
  Working with IBYKUS and the Veeam TAM Service, TEAG is making the most of its Veeam solutions, proactively enhancing its resilience to minimize business risk and benefit from new technologies in the future.