KPN Internedservices Boosts the Dutch Economy with Veeam Cloud Data Management

The Business Challenge

KPN Internedservices designs, builds and manages IT and cloud solutions that support Dutch society. Ministries, local authorities, healthcare organizations and companies of all sizes choose KPN Internedservices for their transition to the cloud.

“All of our customers have the same goal,” said Thing Zhu, Technical Director at KPN Internedservices. “They want secure, reliable and available data, and they want to maintain full control of it.”

The challenge facing KPN Internedservices was keeping customers’ data available. Recovery could be time-consuming, so meeting SLAs was challenging.

“If we can’t recover data quickly for our customers, the societal impact could be huge,” Zhu said. “One of our customers provides public-transportation planning information. If their data isn’t available millions of travelers won’t have the information they need to plan their itineraries and execute travel. Another customer is 1DayFly.com, an online marketplace. Each day they sell different discounted items for a maximum of 24 hours or until stock runs out. If their data isn’t available, customers can’t make purchases and vendors can’t sell their goods. Millions of people and the economy would be impacted.”

Zhu said another challenge was giving customers full control of their data. “Data management should be easy, but nothing was easy with legacy backup. Something as simple as setting up a new backup job was complex for some of our customers. We wanted a solution that simplifies data management for them and one that would function across multiple clouds — we needed a true cloud data management solution.”

The third challenge was finding a vendor to comply with KPN Internedservices’ security and sustainability policies. Vendors must be fully committed to security regulations, including the European Union’s GDPR, and they must share KPN Internedservices’ commitment to a sustainable future. KPN is one of the greenest companies in the world, having been listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index for the seventh consecutive year in 2018.

The Veeam Solution

KPN Internedservices replaced legacy backup with Veeam Backup & Replication. “Veeam helps us keep customers’ data available, so they can focus on adding value to society,” Zhu said. “Society relies on our customers each day for mass-transit planning information and online shopping. Veeam helps us deliver on our promise of data integrity and availability.”

Veeam backs up customers’ data on thousands of VMware vSphere virtual machines to KPN Internedservices’ private cloud, AWS and Microsoft Azure. Zhu said Veeam integrates so well with KPN’s backup storage targets — StoreOnce from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and ExaGrid — that “first time right” backups increased by 100%, data throughput increased six fold and recovery time decreased by 96%. That’s how KPN Internedservices meets customers’ recovery SLAs.

“Veeam backs up all data, no matter where it is, and makes it available,” Zhu said. “We succeeded in simplifying data management for our customers, while giving them full control of their data. They love Veeam’s backup console because it’s so easy to use.”

Zhu believes KPN Internedservices found a kindred spirit in Veeam. “Veeam shares our commitment to security and sustainability. One of the reasons we comply with GDPR is because Veeam encrypts customers’ data during backup and at rest. Veeam supports our sustainability efforts by making data protection easier, faster and smarter, saving our company time, money and energy.”

The Results

• Protects critical customer data to keep society running efficiently
  “We believe cloud strategies offer infinite possibilities to our customers,” Zhu said.
  “Veeam is our ally in making sure their cloud data is always available, so they can operate efficiently and support millions of Dutch people.”
• Reduces recovery time by 96% to meet demanding service level agreements (SLAs)
  Veeam offers fast, efficient restore functionality, such as Instant VM Recovery®, enabling KPN Internedservices to reduce recovery time from hours to minutes.
• Supports General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance and sustainable business processes
  “Doing business in a secure and sustainable manner is deeply rooted in our company,” Zhu said. “We only partner with companies that comply with our security and sustainability policies and Veeam is definitely one of them.”