Tereos simplifies processes and reduces recovery time with cyber-resilience from Veeam

To build on its business success, Tereos initiated a “getting back to basics” program aiming to rationalize and optimize its operations. As part of this effort, the company evaluated its IT infrastructure in Europe, looking both at its data centers and at more than 30 industrial sites.

Tereos emerged from the infrastructure assessment with a renewed focus on two key topics: monitoring and backup. The company was using Veritas NetBackup in its data centers and a mixture of Veritas Backup Exec and Veeam Data Platform across its factory sites. At some sites, backups were found to be unreliable, which created the risk of extended downtime and loss of data in the event of a system failure.

Tereos’ business spans both the agricultural production of crops such as sugar cane, corn and wheat, and the industrial processing of those crops into sugar, starch, alcohol and other products destined for use in the food and pharmaceutical industries. The company’s processing plants are typically large and complex factories in which manufacturing control systems management the movement of raw materials from delivery through all the stages of processing to packaging for onward shipment.

“The production process generates data that allows us to monitor and control the chemical reactions,” said Olivier Combet, Group Head of IT Infrastructure at Tereos. “If a key system went down and could not be recovered quickly and reliably, this could potentially halt the flow of materials through the manufacturing process, leaving the factory unable to receive new raw materials or to dispatch finished products.”

An additional data challenge for Tereos is to protect traceability data. To comply with regulations on food or pharmaceutical security, many of the company’s clients need to be able to track products back through each stage of production. In addition, Tereos and its clients have committed to targets around decarbonizing their industrial processes, so it is vital to capture and store emissions-related data.

To maximize the availability of data, avoid costly interruptions and recover key systems and data quickly, Tereos selected Veeam as its new standard for backing up mission-critical systems in its European manufacturing plants. Veeam is currently installed at 23 sites across Europe, protecting a total of 73 TB across 360 servers. Tereos also uses Veeam to protect its Office 365 data.

“We chose Veeam for pretty simple reasons,” said Combet. “From the technology perspective, it’s fully capable of meeting all our requirements. In addition, it’s an international brand for which we can easily find support. We usually outsource IT operations to trusted partners, so it’s important to select solutions that are easy to manage and widely available.”

As part of the standardization project, Tereos migrated existing VMs in the processing plants to new HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure, which includes cybersecurity protections. The Veeam solution also helps with cybersecurity by enabling off-site backups and making them immutable.

With Veeam protecting key manufacturing, financial and HR systems in its processing plants, Tereos enjoys greater peace of mind around both the availability of systems and the traceability of production data.

“Veeam gives us more flexibility, simplifies our processes and reduces our recovery time,” said Combet. “And because we trust the reliability of the solution, we avoid the potential costs of investing in risk mitigation.”

Previously, eight Tereos processing plants had independently invested in Veeam technology. Tereos has rolled these contracts up into a group- wide contract for all plants, making it easier and more efficient to manage backup.

“Since we started working with Veeam at the group level, we’ve grown the landscape by about 70%,” said Combet. “In commercial terms, the Veeam team has been great at listening to what we want to achieve and then working with our partners to make it happen. My Veeam counterpart is very active and engaged; outside of the technology itself, it’s valuable to have a partner who responds right away and knows what steps to take.”

• Helps Tereos avoid downtime that could halt production in its factories.
  In manufacturing, halting production is costly and can cause significant upstream and downstream disruption. Veeam is helping Tereos keep its factories working without unplanned downtime.
• Slashes the risk of data loss by raising the backup success rate and enabling off-site backups. 
  The KPIs that we present to our management board have improved notably, in particular the success rate for backups in our factories,” said Combet. “This gives us confidence that we will be able to recover key systems reliably in the event of a failure.”
• Provides a standard for protecting mission-critical systems that is adaptable to different scenarios. 
  When it came to finding a cloud solution for storing external backups from the processing plants, and for backing up Office 365 data, Tereos was pleased to find that its partner proposed two solutions — both based on Veeam. “We didn’t need to onboard another supplier: we could stick with our standard technology and continue working with people we know and who understand our business.”