Safeguarding a vital national asset: VNF builds data resilience and controls costs with Veeam

The inland waterways of France play a key role in regional and national development, supporting commerce, industry, agriculture, tourism, and biodiversity conservation. VNF keeps activities on this network running efficiently by managing water resources, maintaining infrastructure, and supporting local communities.

More than 4,500 VNF employees work across 500 locations and rely on critical business systems and collaboration apps such as Microsoft Teams, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint Online. This makes data resilience vital for VNF’s day-to-day operations.

“Ensuring data resilience is essential for users who need non-stop access to files and emails, and for our executives handling sensitive information,” said Philippe Sakwinski, Project Leader at Voies Navigables de France. “We must also comply with demanding regulations such as NIS2, which have specific requirements around data management and accessibility.”

In recent years, VNF has focused on migrating workloads to the cloud to improve cost-efficiency and agility while reducing time spent on administrative tasks. One of the first steps was moving to Microsoft 365.

“We are always evolving our IT systems,” said Sakwinski. “We still run some key business applications on-premises at our main datacenter, but we view the cloud as an opportunity to develop and roll out more automated services. As we migrated more workloads, we knew that this would place a growing strain on our data protection processes and infrastructure and potentially impact costs.”

To protect its on-premises and cloud environments, VNF has continued to invest in its long-term partnership with Veeam. In the first phase of the collaboration, the organization replaced three disparate backup solutions from different vendors with one unified resilience platform: Veeam Data Platform. Today, VNF continues to harness Veeam to protect data from the on-premises systems that run at its main data center.

“Veeam gives us confidence because we know our data is always protected and recoverable, without the administrative headache of managing multiple solutions,” said Sakwinski. “Their proven expertise over the years makes them the clear leader in data resilience.”

To safeguard its Microsoft environment, VNF initially rolled out Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, a backup software solution. The company then pivoted to Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365, a SaaS backup and recovery solution that’s part of Veeam’s unified, multi-workload platform. Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 is purpose-built to protect data from SharePoint, Teams, Exchange, and OneDrive.

With Veeam providing high-speed recovery for M365 environments, VNF will be able to comply more easily with NIS2’s 24-to-72-hour deadlines for reporting significant incidents. Having reliable, searchable backups will also help the organization understand incidents, determine their impact, and demonstrate the ability to recover successfully.

“We were performing cloud FinOps planning when we learned about Veeam Data Cloud”, said Sakwinski. “We quickly saw the potential cost and efficiency benefits of switching to the SaaS model, as we could move away from procuring expensive storage hardware to serve as a backup target.”

For VNF, the self-service restores capabilities of Veaam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 have been especially useful, enabling end-users and the IT help desk to recover files, emails, and documents without having to reach out to the main IT team.

“Previously, my inbox was always full of requests to restore files for individual users,” said Sakwinski. “I was almost becoming a mission-critical resource simply for recovering lost data. Now, our help desk can handle those tickets or users can do it themselves. Setting up the workflow and permissions was straightforward.”

The SaaS model for Microsoft 365 also means there are no servers or storage systems for VNF to manage and patch, further reducing internal workloads. Plus, the organization can scale capacity with a few clicks to support growing requirements as it continues to move workloads to the cloud.

Together, the Veeam solutions provide powerful data protection capabilities for VNF’s cloud and on-premises workloads, while working with one standard provider helps to minimize administrative complexity and overheads.

“We have a single contact for all Veeam components,” said Sakwinski. “That makes my life much simpler, as we can negotiate consolidated pricing rather than having to hold discussions on a product-by-product basis with different people.”

“With Veeam, we have built a robust, reliable data protection setup, and we will continue to explore how Veeam can help us,” said Sakwinski. “For example, we are now looking at Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes to support our continuing adoption of cloud-native technologies. Our goal is to streamline and ensure we have end-to-end visibility into our data, and we know Veeam will deliver.”

• Provides fast, nimble data protection for cloud and on-premises workloads to keep users productive
  Immutable backups and granular recovery protects data against cyberthreats and loss and helps ensure that VNF meets compliance targets.
  “With Veeam, we know that our data is always protected and accessible,” said Philippe Sakwinski.

• Empowers end users to recover lost files, reducing burden on the IT team
  “Previously, data recovery was reliant on trusted experts, which was a significant drain on their time,” said Philippe Sakwinski. “Now, we can delegate these tasks to others, and instead concentrate on more valuable strategic work.”

• Enables seamless scalability of VNF’s data protection environment with predictable costs
  “With Veeam Data Cloud, our costs are predictable,” said Sakwinski. “The licensing model is clear and simple, and we could add any number of new users overnight if we wanted to, without worrying about underlying infrastructure.”