Brink’s Brazil deploys Veeam to protect business-critical systems and reduce backup windows

Entities including financial institutions, mints, jewelers and retailers look to Brink’s for essential services such as transporting cash and precious gems. At the same time, businesses and individuals take advantage of the company’s pioneering payment solutions to maximize convenience.

In Brazil, 10,000 people work diligently in 80 locations spread across the country to deliver a 24/7 service to customers. These employees rely on immediate, consistent access to data at all times — but covering a vast geographical area with unreliable internet connectivity presented a challenge to the company’s data-protection efforts.

“Data underpins all our operations, from transportation to logistics to payments,” said Caio Dalessi, IT Infrastructure Manager at Brink’s Brazil. “Previously, we relied on Veritas Backup Exec to perform daily backups to tape. This was a time-and resource-intensive process, which frequently exceeded our scheduled backup windows.”

Each day, Brink’s Brazil’s 80 locations were tasked with sending their daily backups to the company’s central data center at the São Paulo headquarters. Limited bandwidth meant that this process often failed, causing extra work for the IT team.

“We targeted a modern data protection platform that would give us more control and visibility of backups,” said Dalessi. “And looking to the future, we were aiming to simplify long-term data retention, which would help us reduce the cost of complying with audit requirements.”

Brink’s Brazil chose Veeam Backup & Replication to transform its approach to data protection. Recently, the company has further enhanced its capabilities by deploying Veeam Availability Suite, which combines Veeam Backup & Replication with the comprehensive monitoring capabilities of Veeam ONE.

“We’ve now depended on Veeam for backup and replication for nine successful years,” said Dalessi. “We decided to extend the solution to include Veeam ONE so we could gain end-to-end insight into this essential part of our infrastructure.”

Working with SoftwareOne, a Veeam partner with an expert data-protection team, Brink’s Brazil replaced tape-based backups with Veeam software and a high-performance disk storage array. Today, the company employs Veeam to protect 500 virtual machines (VMs) with several TB’s of data.

“Using Veeam, we can seamlessly back up a mixture of Linux and Windows VMs with minimal complexity,” said Dalessi, “The built-in WAN accelerator compensates for distance and variable bandwidth using techniques including compression, multi-threading and caching. This allows our offices in the furthest reaches of Brazil to send their backups centrally with no issues. Veeam works so well that we have been able to move from daily to hourly backups.”

Thanks to Veeam, Brink’s Brazil backups are now encrypted and immutable for a minimum of seven days by default, creating new layers of protection against cyberattacks.

“It gives us great peace of mind to know that because of Veeam it’s harder than ever for cyber criminals to hold us to ransom,” said Dalessi. “Our new encryption capabilities are also helping us meet the obligations of Brazil’s privacy and data protection laws.”

Brink’s Brazil can now back up essential systems including Oracle Database much faster than before. The company has also gained a single point of control for backups of its entire infrastructure, enabling unprecedented insight and optimization.

“By deploying Veeam alongside the disk storage arrays, we’ve made over-running our backup windows a thing of the past,” said Dalessi. “We’ve also got an end-to-end view of the status of all our backups in the Veeam ONE dashboard. We use the reporting features to help us optimize resource utilization and plan future capacity needs.”

Next on the agenda, Brink’s Brazil will connect on-premises Veeam Backup & Replication archives to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The move will slash the cost and complexity of long-term data retention for the company.

“We’ve just completed a proof-of-concept exercise where we created a virtual tape library on AWS using Veeam and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and S3 Glacier,” said Dalessi. “The results were compelling, and we will soon roll out the solution to our complete environment. By combining Veeam and AWS technologies, we’ll eliminate the significant expense and effort involved in buying tapes to store our long-term data archives, maintaining a secure warehouse to store the tapes, and transporting tapes from our data center to the warehouse. We’re delighted to continue innovating with Veeam by our side.”

Enables hourly rather than daily backups, minimizing the business impact of a system outage
Thanks to Veeam, Brink’s Brazil now has access to much more recent data in the event of downtime, helping it to maintain high levels of service continuity.

Bolsters business resilience by helping to guard against cyber attacks
“Veeam includes a host of built-in features that strengthen our cyber-security strategy,” said Dalessi. “From native backup encryption to backup immutability, Veeam gives us a wide range of effective tools to mitigate the risk of an attack.”

Enhances efficiency by accelerating and centralizing backup management
The Brink’s Brazil IT team saves time and effort on backup administration, and has gained insights for more effective capacity planning and resource utilization.