Safeguarding global supply chains: How Unifrutti cuts data recovery to minutes with data resilience from Veeam

Unifrutti grows premium crops in multiple countries and delivers fresh fruit to customers around the world. However, this global company faces some unique challenges.

“We gather and log data at every stage of harvesting, packaging, and shipping, with the goals of maximizing quality and freshness,” said Dewet Blaauw, Group Network and Security Manager at Unifrutti. “We use this data to ensure the product is delivered to the end customer with the quality they expect, so maintaining complete records is essential to our profitability and ongoing optimization of our crops.”

Power disruptions, internet outages, hardware failures, and malware or ransomware attacks are all facts of life. Preserving data and ensuring recovery without loss is a top priority on Unifrutti’s technical agenda.

“A farm is located where the environment and Mother Nature allow us to operate in the best way possible,” said Blaauw. “High availability of our systems and data is therefore key on our farms and in our head offices. We have very low tolerance for downtime. All our data must be protected and systems must be available 24/7.”

For six years and counting, Unifrutti has chosen Veeam to protect its highly diverse and geographically dispersed data assets to bring the freshest fruit to tables everywhere.

“We review all our technology selections on a semiannual basis and Veeam is the top choice for our needs again and again,” said Blaauw. “The usability of Veeam is streets ahead compared to competing products. You can do sophisticated things with your data resilience such as roll out immutable backups, recover VMs instantly, restore databases within production environments — the list goes on — using very simple controls. Plus, we estimate that Veeam offers 20% lower running costs compared to competing data resilience solutions.”

Unifrutti relies on a combination of on-premises and cloud-based backups depending on location. Using Veeam, the company’s central IT team can manage a global deployment through a single console, providing end-to-end insight and control of data resilience.

“Backing up to the cloud makes sense for most of our offices, while our rural farms are best suited to on-premises backups,” said Blaauw. “The beauty of Veeam is that we can monitor and manage everything from one intuitive interface.”

The Veeam licensing model, based on virtual machines (VMs), enables Unifrutti to deploy instances flexibly and easily, even at some of the most remote locations. In addition, the ability to host Veeam servers on Linux removes operating system license expenses in a very cost-conscious industry.

For farm locations, Unifrutti relies on Veeam Remote Proxy Server to enable automated, hands-off data recovery. More than once, this capability has proved to be useful in the event of hardware failure.

“Using Veeam, the team can restore the environment, enabling operations to continue while a hardware fix is arranged,” said Blaauw. “For example, if a system upgrade for our business-critical ERP system fails at one of our main offices, we can restore the instance within just 8 minutes using Veeam — often before users are aware that there is a problem. That makes data loss less likely than ever before, helping us to ensure that our data logs are 100% complete.”

Unifrutti is taking advantage of built-in malware scanning functionality to bolster its cyber-resiliency measures. For the company’s rural farm locations, this capability is paying dividends.

“Veeam boosts our cyber-resiliency on two counts,” said Blaauw. “First, by equipping us with reliable, easy-to-recover backups, and second, with powerful integrated threat detection, which helps us give even our most remote locations additional layers of protection against cybercrime.”

In Unifrutti’s 24/7 quest to bring perfect produce to people everywhere, Veeam plays a key role in ensuring non-stop business continuity.

“In some ways, we are in a very old business: delivering delicious fruit to customers,” said Blaauw. “The difference is that today our customers are all over the world, and we’re coordinating global supply chains with a product that can lose its freshness in seconds in the wrong conditions. When the chips are down, and it’s a critical situation, I have absolute confidence in Veeam that we can recover.”

• Enables recovery of large amounts of data in just minutes and contributes to 99.995% data availability
  “If our systems go down, delicious fruit with a short window of freshness could go to waste,” said Blaauw. “Months of cultivating the perfect crop could be lost to an IT failure. With Veeam, we can avoid that nightmare.”
• Slashes risk of losing precious compliance data to near zero
  By preserving data logs for its fruit with Veeam, Unifrutti maintains the critical audit trail for temperature-sensitive fresh produce that’s ready for sale.
• Offers 20% lower running costs compared to competing data resilience solutions
  Veeam helps Unifrutti maximize returns on its investments in data resilience, providing advanced capabilities at a very competitive total cost of ownership (TCO).