63 Moons strengthens cloud digital transformation with Veeam

The Business Challenge

The cybersecurity threat landscape is evolving very rapidly, with a steep rise in cybercrime over the last few years. Advanced threats like ransomware, propagated through malicious or compromised websites and botnets, can wreak havoc on organizations. Of all the sectors, the financial services sector is one of the most targeted sectors by hackers across the globe.

“There has been an explosion of data as the pace of digitization has accelerated,” said Neehar Pathare, Vice President, ICT and Chief Information Security Officer at 63 Moons. “Under these conditions, protecting enterprise data can be a major challenge. This is dependent on several factors, including how you secure and back up your data. We also feel that the biggest threat to data security is an internal employee. Most of errors happen due to human error. Now that we have to comply with ISO 27000 and ISO 20000, we need to ensure that humans become error free. Then, we can move onto application-level security and perimeter-level security.”

Apart from data breaches, a cyberattack can lead to system downtime, which is unacceptable in this sector. Data must always be available with no exceptions. 63 Moons wanted to ensure protection of customer data in this fast-evolving threat landscape.

Ensuring compliance with data security and privacy regulations

Sensitive financial data needs to be protected and shared in a safe way that’s in compliance with the regulatory environment. These laws are becoming increasingly stringent in light of rising cyber-attacks. With the integrity of data becoming paramount, ensuring 100% compliance with regulatory bodies is a must. While new regulations have driven up compliance cost, increased capital and liquidity requirements have reduced returns. Low interest rates and limited revenue opportunities have further reduced returns on equity and led institutions to seek reduced operating costs, including reduced risk management costs.

“Since this financial crisis, institutes have faced a tsunami of new regulatory requirements,” said Pathare. “With data becoming the most important asset for businesses, availability is key. In fact, the biggest challenge for 63 Moons is to ensure that our data is always available securely to our customers.”

Data control in a hybrid cloud setup

Today, the cloud has become imperative for improving business productivity and optimizing costs. It can tremendously improve agility, speed, flexibility and scalability. In fact, hybrid and multi-cloud environments are the present and the future of enterprise IT infrastructures. 63 Moons has a number of important applications such as CRM and ERP on the cloud.

“The biggest advantage is cost,” said Pathare. “With the cloud coming in, licensing cost goes down. Also, the cloud allows users to pay as they grow. Therefore, we have started moving simple workloads like CRM applications, accounting, business continuity, collab and even equity access to the cloud. Our entire Microsoft Office suite is now on the cloud, too. Following a multi-cloud setup, we use Azure, AWS and Nutanix.”

However, data residence was still a concern for the company.

“The cloud is something that still is really far off,” said Pathare. “You never know where the cloud is and where the data resides. Ideally, one needs to have more control and direct access to the data.”

The Veeam solution

Veeam’s centralized and comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) solutions provide a guarantee against advanced cyber security threats. Veeam also helped 63 Moons identify malware while backups were still going on. This added another level of protection.

Periodic health check-ups of backup files ensured that 63 Moons’ data was intact. With regular backup taking place daily, weekly and monthly, it was guaranteed that backup schedules were intact. Moreover, Veeam’s replication function enabled better synchronization between production and DR sites so that the latest version is available. Fool-proof data availability made sure that there was no backup failure. Additionally, in the event of any ransomware or cyber security incident, Veeam’s solutions are instrumental in getting the restores done successfully and quickly within the four-hour window that’s required for business continuity, compared to legacy solutions, which can take up to 24 hours.

“Veeam is seamless,” said Pathare. “One of the best features is that during a restore, Veeam software has an audit log for restoration. This allows us to check when the restore was taken.”

A hybrid cloud setup has its own set of challenges. Veeam allowed for better data control and availability in a hybrid cloud setup.

The Results

• Improvement in productivity for the IT team
• Better integration with VMware
• Duplication and compression, which saves a lot of storage space
• Achieving over 90% compression
• Reduction in the entire backup window from 18 hours to six hours
• Faster restore times

“Veeam is like a magic wand in backup,” said Pathare. “Our journey with Veeam has been great. With more and more features getting built in at regular intervals, we know that our decision in choosing Veeam is right. Veeam is the best modern day data protection that we have. It’s very powerful, easy-to-use and affordable.”