Financial Services Firm Safeguards 24x7 Availability and Industry Compliance with Veeam

The Business Challenge

KNEIP provides massive amounts of data to the financial services industry. The firm disseminates 266,000 data points each day and manages 1.63 million data points each month. KNEIP can’t risk losing 24x7 availability of data or email—its primary mode of communication with clients. Another top priority is complying with industry regulatory requirements regarding data security and availability. To safeguard 24x7 availability and industry compliance, KNEIP’s IT team decided to improve recovery time and point objectives (RTPO™) in service level agreements (SLAs) with internal business units.

“Our purpose is to serve the business, and we knew we could serve the business better by replacing the legacy backup tool,” said Lee Marshall, Head of IT, Infrastructure and Operations at KNEIP. “The legacy tool required agents, making backup and recovery very slow. We wanted to accelerate unitary restores. For example, to restore a single mailbox we had to restore the entire VM, and that could take up to an hour. Our goal is to make sure the level of service we provide to internal clients is the level they expect from us. Within the approved budget, the legacy backup tool was making it difficult to achieve that goal.”

Marshall said KNEIP needed to back up and restore new operating systems as well, but the legacy backup tool had limitations that were too expensive to work around.

“We needed an availability solution that was easy to configure and use rather than a solution that required extensive and costly training or weeks of support from an external partner,” Marshall said. “Rather, we needed a scalable enterprise-grade solution. We needed it to work not only in our production environment but also in our preproduction, development and user acceptance test environments. We conducted market analysis and quickly identified our ideal solution.”

The Veeam Solution

Veeam® Backup & Replication™ helps KNEIP safeguard 24x7 availability of data and email and maintain its impeccable record of industry compliance. With Veeem, KNEIP improved RTPO in SLAs with internal business units through fast and reliable backup, recovery and replication.

“Veeam is an enterprise-grade, scalable solution that supports our business now and will support our business in the future as our client base continues to grow,” Marshall said. “No company wants to risk losing their data. Veeam enables us to provide 100% assurance that our backups and replicas are tested and verified recoverable.”

KNEIP verifies the recoverability of backups and replicas with SureBackup® and SureReplica. Veeam tests backups and replicas in an isolated environment called a Virtual Lab and reports on their state and condition. In addition to helping KNEIP provide the assurance to clients that their data is safe, the reports help KNEIP demonstrate backup and recovery compliance during industry audits.

Olivier Tarnus is the IT Manager at KNEIP and uses Veeam on a daily basis.

“Backup, replication and recovery are fast and easy with Veeam, saving us time and effort,” he said. “When a new VM is provisioned, Veeam automatically backs it up, unlike the legacy tool. Depending on the critical nature of an application, Veeam replicates it as often as needed. When an employee asks us to restore a mailbox, Veeam recovers it in minutes. Veeam even requires 30% less backup storage.”

Marshall agreed that Veeam Backup & Replication provides better value than the legacy backup tool. He finds value in another Veeam solution. Veeam ONE™ collects data from hosts and VMs and presents the information in easy-to-understand tables and dashboards. The legacy backup tool didn’t offer reporting, which made capacity planning tedious.

“Veeam ONE gives me complete visibility into the virtual environment,” Marshall explained. “I use Veeam ONE to create a report regarding capacity planning and cost evaluation per business unit, which helps us curb excessive spending by reallocating resources. Because of the granular reporting in Veeam ONE, I can gather the data I need in 30 minutes to an hour. If I didn’t use Veeam ONE, this process would take at least one day.”

The Results

Ensures 24x7 availability and industry compliance
Not only does Veeam Backup & Replication help KNEIP safeguard 24x7 availability of data and email (the firm’s primary mode of communication with clients) Veeam also helps the firm maintain its spotless industry compliance record. Fast and reliable backup, recovery and replication improved RTPO in SLAs with internal business units.

Eliminates the risk of data loss
KNEIP disseminates and manages millions of data points and cannot risk losing them. Veeam’s SureBackup and SureReplica provide KNEIP with 100% assurance that backups and replicas are recoverable.

Helps save money by reallocating computing resources
KNEIP uses Veeam ONE to categorise and group clusters, hosts, VMs and data stores by business unit, making capacity planning easy and cost-effective. With complete transparency into resource usage per business unit, KNEIP reallocates existing resources to curb spending.