Life can be unpredictable. Take my career path — after I finished high school, I started training as an accountant, but realized within a couple of months that it wasn’t the right direction for me. I’d been into computers since I was six, so I decided to try and turn a hobby into a vocation. From working on an IT helpdesk, I got into IT engineering, eventually becoming a systems administrator at VDL, an international manufacturing group. Eventually, I was promoted to systems architect. Today, I relish my role in finding the right combination of technologies to help VDL succeed.
Seeing Data Protection Evolve
During my time in IT, I’ve watched data protection develop from a nice-to-have to a must-have. A few years ago, my best friend was working as an IT manager at a company where they were backing data up to tape. A fire struck their main building and the only reason that the organization still exists is that my friend had taken the tapes off-site that morning! And this wasn’t a small company, either. Stories like that really put the importance of data protection into perspective.
At one of my previous jobs, I got to watch while the DR team went through their recovery procedure step by step. The entire process was captured in a huge stack of paper. It’s wild to consider just how much potential for improvement came along with automation and other new technologies. With the risk of cyberattack increasing all the time, I’m happy to say our own data protection strategy is now light years ahead of paper-based, manual processes.
To me, modern data protection isn’t just about backup. The ability to recover data efficiently and effectively is equally important. More and more, you hear about cyber-criminals carrying out a secondary attack on backups after targeting your production systems. As a result, making sure your backups are isolated and encrypted has never been more critical. Veeam are pioneers in this regard. They understand what matters when it comes to bouncing back from the unexpected.
Saying “Not Today” to Cyber-criminals
Our investment in Veeam paid off big time when we were the victims of a cyberattack a couple of years ago. All our production systems went down, and I was straight on the phone to Veeam for help. Within a couple of hours, I had a Veeam Accredited Service Partner (VASP) on the case.
We got our most important systems back up quickly, and then gradually recovered our entire environment over about a month, all using Veeam. When you consider that we’re a 16,000-person business with operations in 19 countries, that’s an impressive outcome. Best of all, we avoided paying the ransom. That’s one of the reasons I’m an enthusiastic advocate for Veeam — it really proved itself when it mattered.
Rolling with the Punches
The future is a mystery. Our central IT team in the Netherlands serves more than 110 subsidiaries across the world, all of which have different demands and business priorities. One of our challenges is building an agile IT environment that can adapt to all these competing requirements.
Veeam gives us the flexibility to ensure we have rock-solid data protection, regardless of where we choose to take our IT services next. It supports true data freedom, allowing us to back up from and to any environment we want, whether that’s on premises or in the cloud.
My advice to anyone getting started with Veeam is to take full advantage of support from Veeam — and the VASP program — to get yourself set up properly. Veeam is an easy-to-use product, but there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. With help from Veeam and its experienced partners, you can get the most out of powerful Veeam technology and set yourself up for success.
No one knows what’s around the next corner. While I was at VeeamON this year I got a message from a colleague telling me that the hacker that attacked our systems had been caught. It felt like we’d come full circle from the start of the attack: realizing we’d been compromised, recovering with Veeam, and now, seeing the attacker face consequences. I hope we’re not in that position again, but in case we are, I’m glad we’ve got Veeam on our side.