Van Oord delivers marine ingenuity all over the globe by enabling data resilience with Veeam

As a marine contractor, Van Oord has a wide international presence. The company has a long and proud tradition of bringing precision engineering expertise to commercial and public sector projects, including the construction of offshore wind farms. Wherever they are based, Van Oord employees rely on fast, reliable access to data to do their jobs well.

“As a technology-driven company that’s constantly innovating, data is at the heart of our business — and it’s only becoming more important,” said Jochem de Zeeuw, IT Continuity Specialist at Van Oord. “The recent Cybersecurity Assessment  Netherlands report prepared by the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security underlines the risk of ransomware attacks.”

However, the diversity and geographical spread of Van Oord’s IT environment made finding a cost-effective data protection solution a challenge for the company.

“We have vessels all over the world that, in addition to their primary purpose, act as floating data centers as well as much smaller vessels which have a bare minimum of IT hardware on board" said de Zeeuw. “To retain our competitive edge, we cannot afford downtime to essential IT services. So, we looked for a solution that could guarantee high data availability across the entirety of our global IT landscape.”

Van Oord chose to standardize on Veeam as part of its data protection solution, empowering employees at all locations to work with minimal interruptions.

“We selected Veeam to replace a patchwork of data protection tools,” said de Zeeuw. “We were first attracted to Veeam because of the competitive price point. What reinforced our choice was how simple Veeam is to use and manage: you don’t need any special skills to get up and running with Veeam.”

The Van Oord IT team started by deploying Veeam to protect data at its smaller vessels, before rolling it out across its global operations. The company adopted the 3-2-1-1-0 rule, where it maintains three copies of data, stored on two different types of media, with one copy stored at an offsite location and one copy stored offline. To satisfy the final ‘0’, Van Oord uses the built-in SureBackup feature to verify that backups can be recovered without errors.

“Veeam works equally well for our central data centers and for small environments with limited infrastructure and resources, making it the ideal choice for our diverse IT landscape. It gives us confidence that even our most geographically isolated teams can rely on Veeam to protect their data,” said de Zeeuw.

Van Oord engages with the Veeam team on a continual basis to optimize its Veeam implementation. For example, a year ago the company updated its data protection infrastructure based on best-practice recommendations from Veeam to unlock higher performance and new capabilities.

“The Veeam team gave us advice on everything from how to configure our backup repositories and proxies to introducing immutable backups,” said de Zeeuw. “We were delighted to find that adopting a best practice implementation took our backup window down from eight hours to just two hours or less, which basically eliminated the risk of backups over-running and affecting production systems.”

Veeam now plays a central role in Van Oord’s disaster recovery strategy, helping the company to minimize the impact of incidents such as cyberattacks or natural disasters. The solution also contributes to the organization’s ability to comply with new regulations.

“Using Veeam, we’ve bumped up our cyber-resilience measures and sped up our recovery processes dramatically,” said de Zeeuw. “Since we first started using Veeam almost a decade ago, they’ve evolved the technology significantly in line with new risks and threats. As a company that often operates out of the middle of the ocean, we’re used to the hazards that nature can throw at us. But Veeam is also helping us rise to the challenges of more imaginative cyber-criminals and increasingly demanding regulations.”

Looking to the future, Van Oord is assessing how it might deploy Veeam in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure environments. De Zeeuw concluded: “Extending our partnership with Veeam will give us even greater peace of mind when we’re delivering innovation across every sea and ocean.

• Provided comprehensive, easy-to-manage data protection for vessels of all sizes globally
  “We have vessels that can be seen as floating data centers on inland waters and oceans around the world,” said de Zeeuw. “Wherever our vessels are located, Veeam is helping to ensure that all Van Oord employees can access the data they need 24/7.”
• Reduced backup windows by 75% from eight hours to two hours, decreasing the risk of business disruption
  Adopting a best practice implementation for Veeam accelerated backup processes dramatically, protecting production systems from any impact.
• Enabled rapid recovery in the event of a disaster and helped Van Oord prepare for emerging regulations 
  Using Veeam, Van Oord continues to drive down data recovery times and increase cyber-resilience, better preparing the company for both unexpected incidents and compliance with new policies and regulations.