This German manufacturing customer, with a long-standing history in delivering construction supply products, has relocated their secondary backup to the cloud. During their over 50-year history, the still family-operated business has expanded to a workforce of more than 1000 employees and includes numerous production sites and subsidiaries.
"Growth and regulatory compliance steered us towards a secure and robust virtualization platform," the CTO explained. "A large part of our IT infrastructure has already been virtualized using VMware vSphere and our workload VMs. We have been exploring VEEAM Backup and Replication, and now we are ready to implement it in production."
One of the key challenges we faced was the rising prevalence of ransomware attacks and the fallout from those incidents. In addition, we aimed to enhance data integrity and shorten recovery time. In preparation for potential disaster scenarios, we sought an additional layer of backups located in the cloud.
Under the guidance of chief architects Reinhard Partmann and Tobias Paschek from comdivision, it was suggested that Amazon S3, which can be integrated with the VEEAM Backup Solution, be utilized.
The customer employs a wide variety of backup schedules based on the criticality of each system. This ranges from high frequency replication to only weekly backups, used for systems that rarely undergo changes. Following the deployment of VEEAM Backup and Replication, along with base system configuration and repositories, we also created AWS S3 buckets to store the customer's data. The next tasks involved integrating the Cloud Repository on AWS S3 into VEEAM, setting up test backup jobs, and securing the S3 buckets. After conducting and thoroughly testing several Backup and Restore cycles, we moved into production with the new repository.
Having quick external backups that can be easily restored, either on-premises or in the VMware Cloud on AWS, is a significant advancement for the customer. Moreover, the customer now has an off-site storage location. Reliable backups, which can also be tested in a Virtual Lab, are critical for any business to ensure continuity.
