Veeam furnishes CORT with reliable data protection so CORT can furnish the Fortune 500

The business challenge

CORT’s mission is to be an indispensable resource to people and companies looking to make a house a home, an office a great place to work and an event a memorable celebration. CORT provides personalized services to make customers’ experiences extraordinary, whether they’re individual people or Fortune 500 companies. Customer satisfaction is CORT’s greatest measure of success.

CORT is spot on about customer satisfaction. According to HubSpot Research , 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies that offer extraordinary customer service. Research by the Temkin Group shows 77% of customers would recommend a brand to a friend after a single positive experience.

“Our company empowers employees to deliver extraordinary customer experiences, and our data empowers employees,” said Adam Camphuysen, Enterprise Systems Administrator at CORT. “However, if customer data isn’t accessible, it’s harder to provide stellar service.”

CORT’s most critical customer data resides in a proprietary, customized in-house application called V2. It’s comprised of customer records, point-ofsale data, inventory levels, order tracking and delivery information.

“V2 helps run our company, but if it’s unavailable, employees in our stores have to take orders on paper,” Camphuysen said. “While pen and paper are fine, it’s not how a modern business operates, and it’s not customer-friendly.

If V2 is unavailable, individuals and companies logging on to CORT. com might not be able to order furniture or check deliveries. And If V2 is unavailable for an extended period of time, we’d run the risk of losing our competitive edge of extraordinary customer service.”

The problem was legacy backup was unreliable and recovery was horribly slow, making it difficult to meet RPOs and RTOs.

“Legacy backup was a major pain point for the business,” said Paul Dombrowski, Enterprise Systems Administrator at CORT. “Adam and I would get calls in the middle of the night because a critical system was down, and recovery was taking up to an hour. It was time to make a change because we couldn’t risk V2 being unavailable. We had to protect the business.”

The Veeam solution

CORT replaced its backup solutions with Veeam Availability Suite. Veeam backup and recovery are so reliable and fast that CORT reduced RPOs by 99% and RTOs by 92%. Customer data is accessible continuously, enabling the company to provide extraordinary service every time. Veeam also saves nearly 500 hours in troubleshooting each year. CORT allocated that time for strategic business projects.

“You can’t underestimate the importance of data protection to a company’s reputation and bottom line,” Camphuysen said. “Veeam provides continuous access to customer data so we can receive, process and deliver orders efficiently. We couldn’t provide the level of customer service we pledge on CORT.com without full confidence we can restore critical systems in a disaster.”

Veeam backs up 400 TBs on-premises for fast, local recovery and replicates off-premises for disaster recovery and business continuity.

“I can’t count how many times Veeam has helped us recover data quickly,” Dombrowski said. “Whether we’re using Instant VM Recovery or Veeam Explorer for SQL Server, we can dig deeply into any backup to recover exactly what we need. When employees ask us to recover something they’ve mistakenly deleted, we say, ‘No problem, we’ve got this.’ Veeam gives us a level of confidence in our ability to back up and recover like we’ve never had before.”

Dombrowski said that level of confidence applies to CORT’s website too.

“We’re constantly developing CORT.com, but on some occasions, our developers make a change they decide not to keep,” Dombrowski said. “Before we deployed Veeam, restoring CORT.com back to its original form could take hours. Now it takes minutes.”

Those hours add up over the course of a year. Camphuysen said Veeam saves nearly 500 hours, not only in reduced recovery time but also in troubleshooting time.

“It used to take me a few hours each morning to go through the logs, chase backups and figure out what was going on because monitoring and reporting weren’t great in legacy backup,” he said. “That process takes five minutes with Veeam, giving us time to work on strategic projects like updating our virtual desktop infrastructure to VMware Horizon.”

Camphuysen and Dombrowski have been in IT for decades, but they said they’ve never worked with a company that is committed to customer service like Veeam.

“Veeam helps us accomplish our goals as a business,” Dombrowski said. “For example, we might use Veeam DataLabs in the future so our developers can work on CORT.com in an isolated environment. We also might incorporate a cloud environment, and there’s only one solution we’d consider for Cloud Data Management. Veeam is an incredible company with incredible people. We call ourselves Veeam Fanboys.”

The results

• Supports stellar customer service by reducing RPOs by 99% and RTOs by 92%
  “There’s no way we can commit to extraordinary customer service without knowing Veeam is protecting critical customer data,” Camphuysen said.
• Ensures customer records, orders and delivery data are accessible all the time
  “Veeam delivers consistent and uniform backup, replication, recovery, monitoring and reporting,” Dombrowski said. “The new normal with Veeam is everything always works.”
• Saves nearly 500 hours annually, allowing more time for strategic IT projects
  In addition to saving time, Veeam supports CORT’s future endeavors. Veeam DataLabs will verify recoverability, speed up application deployment and provide a safe space for development. Veeam Cloud Data Management will provide easy, secure and reliable cross-cloud data management and migration in a multi-cloud environment.