Global cinema pioneer Gaumont protects business-critical data with Veeam

The Business Challenge

Throughout its long history, Gaumont has always led the way in creating compelling content. As the way in which we consume visual entertainment continues to evolve, the company intends to stay at the forefront of its industry.

To increase its speed and flexibility in adapting to new trends and to support the ongoing diversification of its output, Gaumont has undertaken a major transformation of its information systems — which are hosted in France and used by employees worldwide. By centralizing its resources and then moving them to an external host offering extremely high availability, Gaumont has made it easier for existing and future employees and business partners to use them. 

Having moved its key applications and databases to this external private cloud, Gaumont wanted to ensure that business-critical data was protected against accidental loss or malicious destruction. The company has around 40 virtual machines across 15 physical servers, together with systems storing around 60TB of files. This data comprises some of the most important assets for the business, including accounting spreadsheets, scripts, storyboards and contracts. 

“While the data in question does not include Gaumont’s digital video assets, it is nonetheless vital for our operations,” said Maxime Vidal Madjar, IT director at Gaumont. “We wanted to ensure that this data was fully backed up and available for rapid, reliable recovery — and this required us to think both about a technology platform and a skilled external partner.” 

The Veeam Solution

Given that more than 1/3 of data involved in ransomware attacks is typically unrecoverable, Gaumont wanted to be confident that its investment in backup technology would deliver the targeted protection for data.¹

By selecting Veeam Availability Suite as its platform for protecting critical data, Gaumont gained an enterprise-class platform trusted by many of the world’s leading businesses.

Veeam is the gold standard for backups. We have full confidence that the technology will not let us down,” said Vidal Madjar. “Even the best backup technology depends on the correct set-up and management. We also wanted a partner that could provide expert ongoing management and monitoring, with all data guaranteed to remain within France.”

Gaumont selected Jaguar Network, a leading French provider of enterprise managed services with more than 12 data centers and 1,200 customers, to set up and run its externalized Veeam backup environment. 

“It was clear that Jaguar Network had the technical competence to put in place an architecture tailored to our exact needs, and which would give us full control over backup and recovery. We didn’t want to be dependent on an external entity,” said Vidal Madjar. 

Jaguar Network helped Gaumont migrate its Veeam backups to the primary external data center and then replicate the data to a secondary data center in another region of France. The secondary environment is connected to the primary environment only during the daily replication process, effectively providing an air gap that protects Gaumont against the risk of encryption malware propagating between its data centers.

Gaumont manages its own backup and retention policies through the intuitive Veeam interface and receives real-time information on service quality (incidents, availability, capacity, security) from Jaguar Network.

“The solution from Veeam and Jaguar Network is flexible and ready for the future,” said Vidal Madjar. “Although at present we don’t require a particularly small RTO, we have the option of adopting a full active-active dual-site configuration if our needs change.”

1 Source: Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2022

The Results

Effective protection of key assets
“Our main objective was to protect and secure the most important enterprise assets: our data. The solution from Veeam and Jaguar Network gives us complete confidence that our data is being protected according to a clearly defined backup plan,” said Vidal Madjar.

Flexible and agile recovery
“Mistakes will always happen, and things will always go wrong. So, no matter how carefully your systems are designed, you need another layer of protection and the ability to restore backed-up data rapidly. Veeam gives us great flexibility and agility around requests for data recovery,” said Vidal Madjar.

Easy access to metrics
“It’s vital to maintain full visibility of your backup policies and performance, so that you can be confident in the recoverability of your data. Both the Veeam solution and the Jaguar Network portal give us detailed real-time information and controls, offering us peace of mind that our information assets are protected against loss or corruption.” said Vidal Madjar.