MAX Solutions safeguards data for digital transformation from on-prem to multi-cloud with Veeam

MAX Solutions (MAX) believes that every person deserves a chance to succeed, whatever their background or life experience. It is helping to bring opportunities to people in every part of Australia through a unique business model.

“MAX supports people and organizations through three areas: employment, health and learning,” said Rob Hodgkiss, Infrastructure Manager at MAX. “And we meet our customers wherever they are across the country, setting up new locations to service government contracts or meet demand in the community.”

To make it easier to provision IT resources at short notice, MAX adopted a multi-cloud strategy. The move presented the IT team with a new challenge: ensuring non-stop availability for data across a diverse, fast-evolving IT environment. MAX needed to keep business running while moving from on-prem to cloud.

“We’re a data-heavy company,” said Rob Hodgkiss. “Employees depend on real-time insights served up through custom dashboards to do their jobs. But we didn’t want multi-cloud to over-complicate our approach to data protection. At the same time, we must demonstrate a high level of cybersecurity under the terms of our government contracts, so we couldn’t afford to compromise on functionality.”

To protect data regardless of where it is located — whether on-premises or in various cloud environments — MAX selected Veeam.

“Choosing Veeam was a no-brainer,” said Rob Hodgkiss. “To achieve the data protection we get from Veeam elsewhere, we’d either need to install more than one product or carry out complex tiering of our data. Veeam offers unmatched data portability, protection and scalability, making it an integral part of our journey from on-premise to cloud. Its radical resilience gives us complete confidence in our protection goals, allowing us to bring more opportunities to Australians. Add to that the built-in cybersecurity features such as multi-factor authentication and immutable backups and Veeam ticked every box for us.”

MAX uses Veeam to back up a range of critical applications, including on-premises development and management servers, Office 365 apps, and Active Directory services hosted in Microsoft Azure. The company backs up a total of 13.2 TBs with Veeam, with lowest-priority workloads backed up daily and highest-priority workloads backed up much more frequently.

“Veeam offers integrated data integrity checks that we use all the time,” said Rob Hodgkiss. “Each month, we pick a random workload and verify that it was backed up properly and we can restore it quickly and, invariably, Veeam delivers. If something does go wrong, we can count on the fact that we’ll receive an email alert so we can fix it before the backup is needed.”

Thanks to Veeam, MAX does not require a dedicated backup administrator, freeing up resources that the company can use to advance its technology strategy. Veeam is also facilitating the company’s move to the cloud, helping it to accelerate and de-risk the migration process.

“The automation and visibility that Veeam provides saves my team huge amounts of time that we can instead focus on other business priorities,” said Rob Hodgkiss. “The benefits don’t stop there: the solution is also a key enabler of our move to the cloud. Ultimately, we envision our environment being 99.99% cloud-based, and Veeam minimizes downtime when migrating workloads and allows us to add cloud workloads to our backup topology with a few clicks of the mouse.”

MAX is now exploring recovery orchestration through Veeam. By integrating Veeam with Microsoft Azure capabilities, the company plans to automate the recovery of mission-critical workloads in the event of a disaster.

“Over the next few months, we’ll be finalizing our autonomous recovery plans with Veeam and Microsoft Azure,” said Hodgkiss. “We anticipate that it will help us drive our data recovery times even lower, so that our employees have everything they need to keep bringing opportunities to people in every corner of Australia.”

• Enabled comprehensive protection of workloads across private and public cloud environments, supporting the company’s growth and digital strategy.
  “The multi-scenario fit of Veeam is quite unique,” said Rob Hodgkiss. “It’s the ideal data protection foundation for a company that’s growing fast and that sets up resources across multiple clouds at short notice and is enabling our move to the Cloud.”
• Eliminated the need for a dedicated backup administrator, reallocating resources back to the business and reducing operating expenses.
  By enabling MAX to manage data protection through a single pane of glass, Veeam increases operational efficiency.
• Drove down data recovery times from an estimated 6-8 hours to 4 hours for critical services, helping MAX deliver outstanding service to its customers and meet its customers’ data protection requirements.
  Introducing Veeam cut data recovery times significantly, and they will be brought down even further through recovery orchestration capabilities to be rolled out in the next few months.