From AWS to Azure: Gulf Air slashes backup times for a hybrid multi-cloud environment by 70% with Veeam

For airlines, the customer experience extends far beyond the time a passenger spends on the plane. Gulf Air aims to ensure its customers are satisfied from the moment they purchase a ticket. That means infusing every customer interaction with the warm and welcoming hospitality for which the Arab world is famous.

“Our goal is to maximize customer experience and satisfaction, which means getting passengers to their destinations safely and on schedule, and providing a personalized service,” said captain Waleed Al Alawi, Chief Executive Officer, Gulf Air. “The IT team’s role is to ensure that the data and technology employees need to deliver on this mission are always on hand. Even a minor delay can leave a negative impression in our passenger’s minds. That means we avoid downtime for critical IT systems at all costs.”

Taking its cue from the Bahraini government, Gulf Air is embracing a cloud- first strategy but faced challenges due to the limitations of its legacy data protection solution.

“We are state-owned, so the Bahraini government’s technology roadmap is also ours,” said Al Alawi. “I’m proud to say that Bahrain is a technology pioneer in this area. We were the first country in the Middle East to implement multi- and hybrid-cloud IT to support government operations. We are also rolling out wider remote working policies. All exciting developments, but the changes soon revealed that the tools we used to back up and restore data were not up the task.”

Specifically, Gulf Air wanted greater control and visibility of data protection. With cyber-threats and cost pressures rising, the pressure was on to find an alternative sooner rather than later.

“Every new endpoint introduces new vulnerabilities to our IT environment, so remote working pushed cyber-security up the agenda,” said Al Alawi. “We recruit the very best talent to our IT team, and we want to make the most of those valuable resources. The answer was finding a full-featured data protection solution that was also simple to manage.”

Gulf Air selected Veeam to enable high data availability, helping to ensure exceptional passenger experiences in the air and on the ground. When the organization compared Veeam to competitors, it was the clear stand-out.

“Veeam is top-rated by analysts including Gartner®, which we take very seriously,” said Al Alawi. “Technically, it was the best solution that we evaluated, and offered good value for money.”

First, Gulf Air decommissioned its on-premises disaster recovery (DR) infrastructure and started backing up data to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud using Veeam. It now uses Veeam to protect data for critical systems including its Oracle E-Business Suite ERP, Aircraft Maintenance and Engineering Operating System (AMOS) software for maintenance, repair, and operations, AIMS solution for crew scheduling, and more.

“Previously, we had an air-gapped third copy of our data stored on tape,” said Al Alawi. “Only a super-solid DR in the cloud option would tempt us to make the change. When we discovered immutable backups in Veeam, DR in the cloud was suddenly an option, which we embraced wholeheartedly!”

Gulf Air also chose Veeam to protect its Microsoft 365 applications, which are hosted on Microsoft Azure. Now, thousands of the company’s users across the world are protected from interruptions, enabling them to collaborate effectively and work productively.

“Hundreds of our users are located outside Bahrain, making Microsoft 365 apps such as Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint incredibly important to their work,” said Al Alawi. “With Veeam, we can enable a high level of service continuity, so our dynamic workforce can concentrate on what matters, the customer experience. We estimate that Veeam has helped the IT team increase its performance against SLAs by as much as 30%.”

Using Veeam, Gulf Air can manage backups for 100% of its data across its on-premises and multi-cloud environments through a single pane of glass. The organization is driving down both backup times and administration.

“We love the fact that Veeam is hardware-agnostic, so we can pursue our cloud strategy without giving data protection a second thought,” said Al Alawi. “At the same time, Veeam has cut our backup times by up to 70% and management by 20%. I always believed that McAfee had the best dashboard to manage complex backup policies — Veeam is meeting that standard. As a result, we’ve freed up valuable time for our talented IT team to spend advancing Gulf Air’s business goals. While Arab hospitality is what makes us unique, it’s our high-tech initiatives that enable us to bring it to passengers consistently and cost-effectively.”

Gulf Air is taking full advantage of the Veeam solution’s powerful restore capabilities. The organization’s IT team receives frequent requests to recover database tables, files, and emails that have been accidentally deleted or corrupted. Each month, the team carries out testing to confirm its ability to restore varied workloads across its IT environment. In both cases, Veeam is proving an invaluable tool.

"Veeam comes in useful all the time, giving us rapid, granular restore capabilities that allow us to respond faster to requests from users and regulators,” said Al Alawi. “We’re no longer dependent on any of our on-premises systems for DR, which gives me a great sense of relief. Now we can focus on keeping customer satisfaction sky-high.”

• Increased data availability and the Gulf Air IT team’s ability to meet service level agreements (SLAs) by an estimated 30%. 
  The organization is empowering its employees to work without interruption or delay, allowing them to focus on delivering outstanding service to customers.
• Slashed backup times by up to 70% and enabled comprehensive data protection across a hybrid cloud environment.
  Using Veeam, Gulf Air can manage backups for 100% of its data across on- premises infrastructure plus AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud environments through a central point of control.
• Reduced data protection administration by 20%, giving the IT team more time to focus on innovation. 
  With Veeam behind us, we’re combining world-famous Arabian generosity with high-tech initiatives to delight our passengers, putting us in a class of our own,” said Al Alawi.