Pluspetrol protects critical energy infrastructure with Veeam

Millions of people and businesses across South America rely on electricity and heating powered by Pluspetrol oil and gas. Furthermore, the company plays a huge role in the energy security of the region.

Supplying reliable, sustainable and affordable fuel is no simple task, especially in a region with unique geological features. To extract oil and gas from over 300,000 acres of unconventional reservoirs with minimal environmental impact, Pluspetrol experts depend on fast access to a variety of time-sensitive data—fluid dynamics models, weather forecasts, market reports, and more—to support decision-making.

“To keep our operations running smoothly, it’s essential that our experts can quickly and easily access key information about the health, viability and profitability of our wells and drill sites,” said Nicolás Mena Serafino, Systems and Security Operations Leader at Pluspetrol. “If we experience unplanned downtime, we risk delaying exploration and production, which can have huge downstream cost implications for our business.”

To minimize the risk associated with operational disruption, Pluspetrol is always looking for new ways to enhance the resiliency of the core applications and data underpinning its activities.

“We spotted a few areas for improvement that would help to increase efficiency and strengthen data protection,” said Mena. “For example, we mostly backed up to tape storage devices, which lengthened the time taken both to back up and recover data, simply because we had to move tapes to and from secure storage facilities. What’s more, every location followed a slightly different backup process—increasing maintenance workloads and adding additional complexity to recovery tasks.”

With backups saved to tape and each of its nine regions following unique backup policies, Pluspetrol lacked a comprehensive view of its backup position, which made it harder to ensure that its policies would enable rapid restores in a recovery scenario. In addition, high maintenance workloads meant that IT experts across all regions spent a significant amount of time managing back up processes—reducing the time available for value-added activities.

To reduce the risk of delay and disruption to its core operations, Pluspetrol streamlined its backup activities by setting up standardized processes for all of its nine locations using Veeam Backup and Replication.

"After evaluating proposals from other vendors, we felt Veeam was the best choice because it was compatible with our existing systems and offered broad flexibility," said Mena. "Our trusted business partner, Wetcom, who has helped us protect our systems and data for years, supported us to consolidate, organize and optimize the licensing of Veeam and get the most out of the solution."

Today, Veeam protects 500 virtual servers and 50 physical servers—comprising over 320 TB of core data and including the company’s email server, Microsoft SharePoint platform, its enterprise resource planning solution as well as multiple in-house applications. For added protection and business resiliency, Pluspetrol followed the 3-2-1 rule when creating its new backup policies. With this strategy Pluspetrol backs up three copies of its data stored across two different media, with the third copy backed up to tape and stored offsite.

“With this approach we’re even better protected against unplanned downtime, whether as the result of a cyberattack or an emergency on site,” said Mena. “Since deploying Veeam, we’ve dramatically reduced the amount of time that our IT team spends on backup and recovery maintenance—helping them to focus on innovation. In fact, now half of one full time equivalent can easily manage backups for all regions.”

Looking ahead, Pluspetrol is exploring the possibility of moving its offsite tape backup into to cloud storage. “Knowing that Veeam supports many different variations of the 3-2-1 approach also provides a wide range of options for us to extend protection,” said Mena. “We hope to simplify and streamline our operations even further by embracing cloud capabilities, and Veeam is the perfect solution to support us on this journey.” 

• 98% faster recovery times achieved with Veeam, down from three days to under one hour. 
  In the event Pluspetrol experiences unexpected downtime, Veeam’s standardized backup processes minimize business disruption using timely copies of data and applications—ensuring a rapid recovery.
• Enhances back up performance and scales effortlessly to protect mission-critical data across nine countries. 
  “We’ve enjoyed excellent performance for all our back up operations since deploying Veeam,” said Mena. “Thanks to the inherent flexibility of the Veeam solution, we can also seamlessly increase capacity as our business grows.”
• Supports excellent IT services for all Pluspetrol business units. 
  Mena said: “Our internal users are very happy with Veeam, and they’re pleased that we can back up and restore their data much faster. Previously backup maintenance activities across all regions required the equivalent workload of two FTEs, with Veeam we’ve successfully reduced this to just under 0.5 FTEs.”