Banco Mercantil and Veeam: Strengthening Backup Infrastructure for the Digital Age

For over 70 years, Banco Mercantil has built a reputation for providing high-quality banking services to the Brazilian market. Kleverton Assis, IT Manager at Banco Mercantil, said: "Our digital systems play a vital role in delivering exceptional customer service, which is why we are continuously investing in improving and expanding these resources."

Banco Mercantil provides end-to-end services through a virtualized IT infrastructure, comprised of approximately 1,600 virtual machines (VMs) with a total of 160 TB of data. Ensuring business availability and continuity is one of the bank's main goals, but the organization's previous backup tool made this difficult.

Rafael Gomes, Infrastructure and Middleware Coordinator at Banco Mercantil, said: "The number of problems with our previous tool was increasing month after month. Often, backing up our systems took more than 12 hours, which increased the risk of jobs being performed during business hours and disrupted customer-facing services. Backup processes also frequently failed, forcing us to divert dozens of IT employees from other tasks to combat the problems." In short, the previous tool was not only slow and unreliable but also became a major drain on resources. The monthly increase in problems suggests that the situation was unsustainable and scalable in terms of risk and cost. As Banco Mercantil prepared to take the first step on its cloud migration journey, it saw an opportunity to transform its data resilience strategy.

Renata Guimarães, IT Tech Lead at Banco Mercantil, said: "To improve operational efficiency and agility, we decided to migrate approximately 800 VMs to a public cloud provider. Our provider did not have a second availability zone for Latin America, so we needed a reliable business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) solution. It was the perfect time to take a fresh look at our entire data protection strategy." 

After an in-depth market assessment and a proof-of-concept process, Banco Mercantil chose Veeam Data Platform to protect its mission-critical systems. 

"Veeam stood out to us as the best choice in some important areas: reliability, efficiency, and data compression," said Renata. "With Veeam, we were able to drastically reduce our backup window without making any changes to our underlying IT infrastructure. In addition, Veeam Data Platform allows us to increase compression by 50% compared to our previous tool - all while tripling our data retention policy from 30 to 90 days." 

Today, Banco Mercantil uses Veeam's continuous data protection technology to replicate data from on-premises and cloud environments to its DR site. For critical assets, such as databases, the company retains daily VM snapshots for 365 days, allowing on-demand recovery to any point in the previous year. 

"With Veeam's immutable backups, we gain peace of mind that our data cannot be modified after the fact - a powerful layer of defense against attacks," said Renata. "In addition, replicating workloads in the cloud for our DR site gives us the level of data resilience we need to confidently migrate to the cloud."

Using Veeam, one or two IT employees now complete all daily backup tasks in just eight hours, freeing up the broader team to focus on the bank's ongoing digital innovation program.

"With the old tool, we were constantly on high alert because problems were so frequent," said Gomes. "When backups took too long, it caused chaos in our production systems. We needed to set up crisis rooms with 20 IT team members just to deal with these problems. With Veeam, everything works perfectly — it has made a huge difference in our daily productivity and team satisfaction."

Banco Mercantil has already used Veeam's capabilities to help mitigate business risks. When a large cloud virtual machine, with more than 9 TB of data, suddenly went offline, the organization was able to fully restore it from a recent backup in less than 10 minutes — a task that would have taken a full day of work with the old tool. With integrated scanning and alerting capabilities, Veeam empowers the bank to proactively defend against cyber threats.

Looking to the future, Banco Mercantil plans to continue expanding its success with Veeam. In the coming months, the bank will use Veeam's orchestration capabilities to enable deeper integration with its cloud services and automated failover in the event of unplanned outages.

"In the pursuit of excellence in customer service, we continue to expand our cloud presence," said Renata. "We plan to explore more opportunities to use Veeam and make our new platforms and workloads more secure and resilient."

Solution call-out quote

"When backups took too long, it caused chaos in our production systems. With Veeam, everything works perfectly — it has made a huge difference in our daily productivity and team satisfaction." Renata Guimarães, Virtualization Tech Lead at Banco Mercantil

• Enables 98% faster recovery of cloud and on-premises systems 
  "In the past, restoring VMs or even individual files was always complicated and very time-consuming," said Renata. "With Veeam, we can achieve in minutes what previously required hours of work."
• Triples data retention time while reducing physical storage requirements by 50%
  With Veeam's integrated compression, Banco Mercantil uses its existing storage infrastructure more efficiently — allowing it to store more copies of data using fewer storage resources.   
• Reduces backup time from 12 hours to 8 hours, protecting customer-facing services.
  The bank now completes daily backups 33% faster, virtually eliminating the risk of backups interfering with business hours and helping to ensure digital banking services are always available for customers.