Carnes Viba averts millions in ransomware damage with Veeam and DRPMéxico

From its home base in Monterrey, Mexico, Carnes Viba brings mouth-watering meats to customers as far afield as Egypt and Japan. Getting its products from the field to the refrigerator is a complex process that involves many moving parts — and the company can’t afford interruptions to any of them.

These unique demands presented Rodolfo Villanueva with a tough challenge when he took up the role of corporate IT manager at Grupo KMM, the parent company to Carnes Viba. At the time, the company depended entirely on a physical-server infrastructure to support all aspects of its business, from plant operations to distribution.

“It was a 24-hour operation, and we had all the servers on premises,” said Villanueva. “If a server went down at any time, day or night, I had to go there to resolve the problem. In those days, it was impossible for me to sleep peacefully at night.”

Compounding the issue was Carnes Viba’s reliance on on-site backups, which meant that it could potentially lose everything if a disaster or breach occurred at its main site. Recognizing that the situation was unsustainable, Villanueva set out to overhaul the company’s IT landscape.

“We wanted to ensure that even if the entire production infrastructure failed, we could recover fully,” said Villanueva. “So, we engaged a third-party provider to evaluate our environment. They recommended that we make the change from a physical to virtual infrastructure, add high-availability servers and invest in an offsite backup and replication solution.”

To realize the goal, Carnes Viba turned to DRPMéxico, a Platinum Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP). DRPMéxico proposed its backup-as-a-service (BaaS) offering, powered by Veeam Cloud Connect.

“DRPMéxico has been a tremendous partner,” said Villanueva. “They showed us exactly how to perform a restore due to a cloud backup error — and getting set up with BaaS itself was very straightforward.”

Using Veeam Cloud Connect, Carnes Viba simply points its backup jobs to DRPMéxico’s private cloud. The encrypted backup copies are as safe and confidential as they would be in a dedicated off-site repository, so Carnes Viba can rest assured that its data is fully protected and easy to recover.

“With Veeam, the user experience is straightforward — much more so than other backup solutions that I’ve seen,” Villanueva said. “On top of that, the DRPMéxico team provides very attentive services. They monitor for outages and notify us immediately if there’s an issue with our environment. That's great added value for us and it takes a lot of weight off our shoulders.”

In June 2021, the company’s new backup strategy was put to the ultimate test when Carnes Viba was hit by a ransomware attack that encrypted its entire production environment. In a matter of hours, the company fully recovered using a Veeam backup, which was restored from the cloud.

“The worst actually happened, but we were lucky enough to have DRPMéxico and Veeam protecting us,” Villanueva said. “The ransomware attack took out all our servers, as well as the backups that we had on site. We immediately got in touch with DRPMéxico, who reassured us that everything could be recovered from the cloud. It was an incredibly stressful day, and they really stepped up. DRPMéxico helped us download and mount the restores and even worked with us to set up new servers. The attack started around noon, and by five or six in the afternoon we were back up and running with everything again — almost as if nothing had ever happened. The only limiting factor was the speed of our internet connection!”

Avoided millions in losses from a recent ransomware attack.
“If we didn’t have Veeam, we would have lost millions of pesos worth of production,” said Villanueva. “We didn’t have to pay a ransom and we were able to recover in a matter of hours, minimizing the impact on our factories, deliveries and end customers.”

Minimized IT workload while maximizing peace-of-mind.
The entire business can rest assured that vital information and systems are fully protected, and IT spends less time managing backup and replication.

Gained complete protection without added cost or complexity. 
Opting for a BaaS model means there’s no need for Carnes Viba to build and maintain a secondary backup infrastructure, saving time, money and effort.