Keeping refreshment flowing: The Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Saudi Arabia strengthens cyber resilience with Veeam

The Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Saudi Arabia brings the world’s most loved and instantly recognizable beverages to consumers, retailers, and partners across the country.

“We’re proud to be powering the future of refreshment in Saudi Arabia,” said Syed Kareemuddin, IT Infrastructure and Cybersecurity Manager of The Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Saudi Arabia. “We are the authorized local bottler and distributor of all Coca-Cola products in the country and have built a world-class manufacturing and distribution network. Our mission is to strengthen our position by driving sustainable growth, operational excellence, customer satisfaction, and digital transformation, while supporting the ambitions of Saudi Vision 2030.”

To prevent interruptions to bottling and distribution, The Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Saudi Arabia is now adopting a proactive resilience model.

“With the geopolitical situation changing so fast in the Middle East, we decided to strengthen our technology strategy by becoming less dependent on individual vendors,” said Kareemuddin. “Microsoft 365 powers the collaboration, communication, productivity, and secure information management our business depends on, so we wanted something more than the built-in 45-day retention limit with basic recovery.”

To cap off its resilience strategy, The Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Saudi Arabia chose Veeam to safeguard its Microsoft 365 data. By ensuring these business-critical workloads are comprehensively backed up and recoverable, Veeam helps the company avoid operational disruption.

“I’ve used Veeam since it was first launched in Saudi Arabia years ago in various roles and I’ve loved it from the start,” said Kareemuddin. “Wherever I go, I take Veeam with me, because nothing else on the market comes close on flexibility, cybersecurity, and ease of use.”

The Coca-Cola Bottling Company opted for Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365, part of Veeam Data Cloud, Veeam’s unified SaaS data resilience platform. The company worked with Veeam to fine-tune their installation and now protects 100 TB+ of Microsoft 365 data.

“We chose Veeam Data Cloud because it gives us unlimited storage in an all-in-one cloud service,” said Kareemuddin. “It allows us to leverage powerful data protection and security technology without the burden of managing and maintaining it ourselves. The Veeam team responded rapidly and effectively when we had some teething problems immediately following implementation. They moved our data from the Veeam datacenter in Amsterdam to UAE to cut down on latency and enable rapid data recovery.”

Using Veeam, The Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Saudi Arabia can now recover Microsoft 365 data faster and from further back than ever before, which powers business productivity.

“Data that used to take us four hours or more to recover can now be restored with Veeam in less than 30 minutes,” said Kareemuddin. “We’ve also gone from 45-day retention to months. For example, we recently recovered the account of a user that left the company 13 months before. That would’ve been impossible before Veeam.”

The Coca-Cola Bottling Company also closed a gap in its resilience strategy with Veeam. By making use of security features built into Veeam Data Cloud, the company is increasing its protection against internal and external threats.

“Our Microsoft 365 backups now benefit from service-level immutability through Veeam,” said Kareemuddin. “We also use Veeam to scan our backups for malware, which identified an infection and allowed us to clear it with antivirus software before it had any impact.”

With a strong foundation now in place, the company plans to extend its Veeam implementation to new workloads, ultimately creating a single point of control for powerful data resilience across its entire IT environment.

“In the past, we felt we had to rely on other vendors to help us recover our data,” said Kareemuddin. “In contrast, Veeam gives us control of data recovery while taking care of the underlying hardware, security updates, and so on. As a result, we’ve decided to bring our Azure and AWS workloads under Veeam too and will begin testing the solution soon. Veeam helps our IT function inspire greater confidence in our business users, so they can focus on bringing delicious refreshment to customers 24/7.”

• Cut Microsoft 365 data recovery times from four hours or more to less than 30 minutes
  With fast, flexible data recovery from Veeam, The Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Saudi Arabia is empowering its users to work more productively.
• Extended Microsoft 365 data retention from 45 days to months
  The Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Saudi Arabia was able to recover data from an account retired 13 months previously, fulfilling a business request and sending user satisfaction soaring.
• Improved resilience dramatically without over-burdening the IT team
  “Veeam unites the very best-in-class data resilience capabilities with simplicity for our IT team,” said Kareemuddin. “The result is fewer interruptions to our bottling and distribution lines, so we can keep bringing the world’s favorite beverages to customers across Saudi Arabia.”