Yazaki Brasil Adopts Data Resilience Against Cyberattacks and Outages Using Veeam Data Platform

Yazaki Brazil relies on its digital systems to bring innovative automotive parts to market quickly and efficiently. Any disruption to IT services threatens the company’s reputation for reliability and puts its commitment to regional development at risk. 

“As part of the ‘Yazaki spirit’, we set up manufacturing units in remote or underserved areas,” said Thiago Mendes Dos Santos Ruiz, IT Manager at Yazaki Brazil. “For our business to operate effectively in every location, our IT systems need to be available at all times. We need to be prepared to bounce back fast from any incident — whether that’s a cyberattack or infrastructure outage.”

A few years ago, Yazaki Brazil’s business resilience was put to the ultimate test when it was targeted by the LockBit ransomware group. The company was able to protect its backup data from the cybercriminals but found the speed of its recovery lacking. 

“The LockBit attack served as a valuable wake-up call,” said Thiago Mendes Dos Santos Ruiz. “Yazaki Mercosul CEO Lázaro Figueiredo and CIO Wagner Castellani gave us their full support during the recovery process, where we worked together with Gustavo Losch, IT and Governance Supervisor, and our colleagues at the Yazaki Corporation headquarters in Japan, as well as in the YNCA/YEMEA regions. The attack highlighted gaps in our data protection strategy, which included inefficient and unreliable backup software that required a lot of administration. It was time for a change.”

Yazaki Brazil selected Veeam to deliver comprehensive protection and fast recovery of data. By enabling high business continuity, Veeam is helping the company to achieve its mission of combining commercial success with regional development. 

“During our evaluation phase, we compared Veeam to solutions from other vendors, such as Commvault,” said Renan Pereira de Souza, IT Analyst at Yazaki Brazil. “We chose Veeam because it was the strongest technical solution with features like Instant Recovery and immutability. Veeam also came highly recommended by our counterparts at Yazaki United States and Europe.”

As a pilot phase, Yazaki Brazil deployed Veeam at two smaller plants to protect 20 virtual machines (VMs) and approximately 3 TB of data. Delighted by their experience, the company’s IT team then carried out a full rollout across all 13 locations, protecting a total of 300 VMware VMs. Each location backs up to local storage first, with 14-day retention and local immutability, before data is copied to Amazon S3 cloud storage, where it is retained immutably for 30 days.

“Veeam has totally changed our approach to data protection,” said Renan Pereira de Souza. “We’ve gone from backing up data weekly or even monthly at some locations to daily incremental backups at all sites. By replacing our tape backups with hard drives and combining them with Veeam, a full backup from scratch now completes in 18 hours rather than seven days.”

Yazaki Brazil has dramatically improved its ability to recover from disaster with Veeam, boosting both the recency and quality of its backups and accelerating recovery processes. The company has also bolstered its cyber-protection measures using Linux Hardened Repositories, immutability and encryption features built into Veeam.

“Using Veeam, we can recover a VM in just 10 minutes instead of the two plus hours it took us before,” said Renan Pereira de Souza. “Our backups run faster and more reliably, and crucially, they’re now a lot more secure.  We use SureBackup to automatically check on five randomly selected VMs each night, giving us confidence that all data is backed up correctly and giving us an audit trail for the regulators.”

By deploying Veeam, Yazaki Brazil has increased its data protection capabilities while reducing the associated administrative burden. The company has decreased the resources dedicated to managing this part of its technology strategy, while gaining assurance that it’s better prepared than ever for anything.

“At each of our 13 sites, someone used to spend more than two hours a day administering backups — with Veeam, this has dropped to just 30 minutes,” said Renan Pereira de Souza. “Added up, this time saving equates to one full-time employee, freeing up resources for innovation. Compression via Veeam is also delivering efficiencies, taking a 10 TB dataset to 5.7 TB rather than the 9 TB achieved by our previous solution.”

Looking to the future, Yazaki Brazil plans to build on a strong relationship with Veeam. Specifically, the company will soon deploy Veeam Data Cloud Vault and is investigating Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365.  

“We were blown away when we raised a ticket with Veeam support on a Sunday and received a human response in just six minutes,” said Renan Pereira de Souza. “I’m an active participant in Veeam User Group and other community forums, which helps us get the most out of Veeam solutions. I’m excited to see where our data protection journey with Veeam takes us next.”

• Cut full backup times from 7 days to 18 hours and moved from weekly to daily backups
  With Veeam, Yazaki Brazil has dramatically improved the recency and quality of its backups, helping to minimize disruption in the event of a disaster.
• Slashed VM recovery times from 2+ hours to just 10 minutes and increased trust in backups
  “After a ransomware attack served as a wake-up call, we’re so happy to have adopted Veeam to give more comprehensive data protection and faster data recovery,” said Thiago Mendes Dos Santos Ruiz.
• Decreased backup management times from 2 hours/day to 30 minutes/day
  Yazaki Brazil’s new data protection capabilities are both more powerful and more efficient, helping to make the company mission of combining commercial success with regional development a reality.