Veeam powers the expansion of EG Group by increasing data resilience and reducing backup times by 90%

Each day, EG Group serves 2.5 million customers across Europe, the US and Australia. The company wants to reach even more people, growing its multinational network of sites through a combination of acquisition and new developments.

“Expanding rapidly in a short space of time makes EG Group extremely dynamic, but also presents challenges,” said Rob Green, IT Infrastructure Manager at EG Group. “We wanted to make onboarding sites and devices into our backup regime easy.”

At the heart of EG Group’s winning strategy is data: the company continually analyzes data collected from its vast network of sites to power decision making. Within corporate headquarters, users rely on consistent access to critical IT services to keep the fast-growing retailer on track.

“For our wide array of business applications, our users depend on uninterrupted access to up-to-date apps to help improve business and financial performance,” said Rob Green. “For example, we’re constantly analyzing and adjusting the price of fuel at our sites to make sure we maintain our competitive advantage.”

EG Group chose Veeam to protect vital IT services and data, enabling the enterprise resilience to power its expansion. Since the initial selection in 2018, the company has extended its usage of Veeam significantly.

“Every time that Veeam comes up for renewal it’s an easy choice to stick with it,” said Rob Green. “When you compare Veeam to products to the competition, the user interface is far more intuitive. Veeam support is light years ahead of competing vendors. And the functionality just gets better and better.”

Today, EG Group uses Veeam to protect nearly 1 PB of data and growing. The company began by backing up VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines, and now protects several Nutanix AHV clusters. EG Group backs up a wide range of workloads such as data from Microsoft 365 applications including Outlook, SharePoint and OneDrive, and various other systems.

“Veeam has released a stack of purpose-built features for Nutanix in recent months that make our jobs a lot simpler,” said Rob Green. “We take a multi-layered approach to backups and are always looking to add new layers of redundancy and resilience to our data protection strategy. I know Veeam will adapt to whatever roadmap we choose with ease.”

EG Group also harnessed Veeam to enable its move to the Nutanix cluster. The company was able to minimize disruption to the business while reducing the risk of data loss.

“With Veeam, we were able to migrate huge amounts of data for sites across the world to our Nutanix cluster with just a 20-minute outage,” said Rob Green. “I’m not sure what we would’ve done otherwise — we tried some other approaches but ended up falling back onto Veeam to finish the job.”

Using Veeam, EG Group has cut both backup and data recovery times significantly. As a result, the company has reduced the risk of backups over-running and affecting production systems, or delays to users accessing data.

“We’re also able to recover data so much faster, and even instantly in some cases. We can rest assured that if our critical infrastructure suffers an outage, Veeam will get us back online with minimal disruption to the business. That allows EG Group to keep functioning at its best and seize the next growth opportunity that comes our way,” said Rob Green.

• Protects nearly 1 PB of data and growing with zero scaling or integration issues. 
  Veeam is the ideal data protection solution for a dynamic company like EG Group that’s expanding fast,” said Rob Green. “When we make our next major acquisition, we have no doubt that we can scale or adjust Veeam to maintain our growth.”
• Enables high-speed, low-risk data migration, facilitating EG Group’s growth strategy. 
  Using Veeam to move data helped the company execute a key stage in its consolidation strategy, reducing costs and driving up efficiency.
• Cuts backup times by more than 90% and accelerates data recovery, supporting high business continuity. 
  We can rest assured that if our critical infrastructure suffers an outage, Veeam will get us back online with minimal disruption to the business,” said Rob Green. “That allows EG Group to keep functioning at its best and to seize the next growth opportunity that comes our way.”