I got into IT totally by chance. Although I’ve always been a technology geek, cars were one of my other early passions in life. To try and break into the automotive industry, I took my first job in the training and development center for a leading car brand. The company was rolling out an innovative on-board diagnostics tool for their cars, and my job was to help train auto mechanics to use the new platform. It was my first taste of IT, and I was hooked.
In the two decades since, I’ve had the privilege of helping businesses in many other sectors to improve their approach to IT. Today, I bring that passion to my role as head of the technical services team at Ultra, a global leader in measurement and control solutions. We design high-tech monitoring systems that work in some of the planet’s harshest environments, including the intense heat at the heart of nuclear reactors.
Passion for Progress
What I find most rewarding about IT is how we can use technology to make things better. For example, when I was the head of infrastructure and security at one of the biggest theme park operators in the UK, I led the transformation of the organization’s IT capabilities — including setting up their first ever service desk.
Continuous improvement has been a theme throughout my career. When I worked as a solutions architect in the managed services provider (MSP) sector, one of the things I valued most was working with clients to understand their pain points and figure out how to leverage technology to solve them.
At Ultra, we never settle for the status quo either. We’re always looking for ways to do things better — and that commitment to continuous improvement is one of the main things that attracted me to the role.
Protecting Sensitive Data
When I first joined Ultra, there was a compelling challenge to solve. We needed to overcome the limitations of an aging IT infrastructure to ensure that vital data was fully protected. As the custodians of highly sensitive data for clients including the U.S. Department of Defense, data loss or extended periods of downtime for core systems are unacceptable. However, the previous tape-based backup system was no longer getting the job done.
Ultra was crying out for a new data protection solution, and I had a wealth of past experience to draw on. When I was working with MSPs earlier in my career, data protection was always a key element of the solutions we designed for our clients. I’ve worked with many different data protection products over the years — but Veeam was the one that always stood out from the crowd.
Over the years, I’ve watched how Veeam has evolved from a product targeted mainly at enterprise users to a highly versatile and extraordinarily feature-rich solution for businesses of all sizes. As I saw how attentively Veeam listens to their customers and addresses their needs, they quickly became my first call for data protection.
Enhancing Security with Veeam
As part of a large-scale IT refresh at Ultra, we deployed Veeam to help safeguard our mission-critical services. Today, Veeam protects 70 TB of virtual machines, with real-time replication for our most critical data.
Given the sensitive nature of our work, security is paramount. We allocate two-thirds of our IT budget to security to help protect against an ever-changing threat landscape. We conduct regular wargames exercises to help us identify and address weaknesses and vulnerabilities — and Veeam perfectly complements this proactive approach.
Because we work with highly sensitive intellectual property on behalf of government clients, any products we use need to meet a wide range of stringent requirements. Veeam takes security just as seriously as we do. As well as building an ecosystem of cybersecurity partners, Veeam is introducing enhanced capabilities around malware and vulnerability scanning that will help us keep our data more secure than ever.
Building on the Best of the Best
For me, continuous improvement in data protection means understanding the new risks that are trending and building an effective strategy to address them. With Veeam, we can put our disaster recovery scenarios to the test without disrupting our production operations, which gives us the confidence that we can bounce back quickly in the event of an attack.
I’ve been using Veeam in one iteration or another for over a decade. As an IT manager and as a reseller, I’ve thoroughly tested what the data protection market has to offer, and I’m confident that Veeam is the best solution available today.
