AUCloud safeguards Australian government data with Veeam

The Business Challenge

Data Availability and retention is critical to AUCloud’s customers, especially government agencies, which deal regularly with classified information. Loss or disruption to this information could have severe implications on national security and pose a significant threat to Australia’s public sector service delivery.

Without an existing backup solution that could fulfil the needs of both AUCloud’s internal infrastructure and customers, the company was seeking a cost-effective data management and backup solution that was easy to deploy across the business and with customers.

In addition, several AUCloud customers were transitioning to the higher security “PROTECTED” classification of Office 365. AUCloud needed a data Availability partner that could back up customer email, SharePoint and Office 365 systems to the appropriate data classification, so that in the event of a major incident, mission-critical operations could continue. It therefore required a comprehensive Cloud Data Management solution.

The Veeam Solution

AUCloud took a customer-led approach to find the optimal solution to service its customer base. As several Australian Government Agencies were already utilising Veeam across their business, the partnership with Veeam was “a no-brainer”, shared Head of Compute, Storage and Backup, Peter Zafiris.

“One of the benefits Veeam provides to our business is the ease of deployment and integration,” said Zafiris. “With a significant number of government agencies already utilising Veeam, we found backing up and managing data recovery quite a simple process.”

Moreover, AUCloud’s main secondary storage vendor is Cisco and Veeam’s strong alliance with Cisco was also critical to the integration process.

“Our virtual machine (VM) infrastructure makes up 98% of AUCloud’s internal business. We use Veeam in conjunction with our Cisco UCS S3260 Storage Servers to back up internal VMs and Microsoft Office 365 tenancy, which are both critical to our business.” 

Zafiris added, “The Cisco validated designs around integration with Veeam made it easy to set up and use. It also aligned with our business as we are close partners [with Cisco]. We are one of the exclusive number of providers globally to achieve Cisco Master Partner for Cloud and Managed Services status.”

It was also critical that AUCloud’s data management partner had a presence in Canberra, Australia, where most of Australian Government IT infrastructure is based.

“We’ve got excellent local support from Veeam, which is very important to us. The Veeam engineers in Canberra support our internal engineering and product teams,” said Zafiris.

After deploying Veeam, AUCloud was impressed with the recovery time. Zafiris recalls, “There was an incident where we had to recover an entire VM. It took approximately 10 minutes to restore the VM. We are really happy with these turnaround times – Veeam absolutely meets our business needs.”

AUCloud’s customers have also mentioned how easy it is to use the self-service portal to recover items from their Microsoft Office 365 estate. One customer shared, “I’m pleased to report that we had a case to restore a lost folder from someone’s mailbox yesterday and it was easy as pie!”.

Lastly, the Head of Compute, Storage and Backup cites price competitiveness as an important factor in their decision. He sums up, “In comparison to other providers on the market, Veeam is more intuitive and offers a more flexible and cost-effective solution.”

 The Results

Confidence and peace of mind: Protecting revenue and reputation
“We’ve never had a major incident, but we are confident that in the unfortunate event of a disaster affecting our mission-critical infrastructure, Veeam would get us up and running in hours, significantly minimising revenue loss and reputational damage.”

Cost-effective Cloud Data Management solution for critical business data
“Another vendor proposed a similar solution as Veeam; however, it was nowhere near as cost-efficient. At the end of the day, long-term retention and data protection is what we require from our backup solution provider, and Veeam provides this.”

Instantaneous recovery saves time and money
“It’s easy to use, easy to set up and configure, improving efficiency across the business. We can restore or recover VMs in minutes, depending on the size of the backup. It is almost instantaneous in some cases, with Veeam’s Instant VM Recovery.”