#1 Global Leader in Data Resilience

One Data deploys Veeam to deliver enhanced cyber security and AI-powered data products to its customers

For backups of production workloads in our new offering, we wanted a stable, mature and proven solution that just works. And that’s exactly what we got with Kasten K10.
Julian Breiteneicher
Tech Lead IT Infrastructure
One Data GmbH

The Business Challenge

One Data delivers advanced data insights for its customers through its AI-Powered Data Product Builder. As the company grew, new customers increasingly asked for a hosted option.

Florian Schöpp, Head of Customer Success at One Data, said: “When we decided to launch a new version of our product, we wanted to ensure business continuity right from the start and minimize the risk of cyberthreats even further.”

Additionally, One Data saw an opportunity to boost productivity by supporting its solution engineers more effectively. Julian Breiteneicher, Tech Lead IT Infrastructure at One Data, said: “Our solution engineers spend a lot of time connecting to dozens of unstructured and structured data sources to generate insights for customers. By providing them with a well-defined base configuration for demos and Proof of Value deployments, we could help them start projects more quickly.”

As One Data embarked on its journey towards becoming a product company, it wanted a reliable solution to protect customer data in production environments. It also wanted to ensure data availability for key collaboration applications such as Microsoft 365. At every step, the company looked to preserve its competitive advantage: speed over the competition. Florian Schöpp said: “To maintain our speed and agility, we needed to standardize on the best possible cloud-native tools that could support our business growth.”

One Data was an early adopter of Kubernetes as a futureproof way to run and scale its solutions. It started with test and development workloads, and rapidly added three different and independent backup toolsets for its six Kubernetes clusters. When the company decided to launch its hosted service on Kubernetes, selecting a single, powerful data protection solution became a priority.

“First, we decided to consolidate our clusters and standardize on SUSE Rancher,” said Julian Breiteneicher. “Next, we looked for a data protection solution that could seamlessly integrate with Kubernetes, allowing us to use all the capabilities the container orchestration and management platform has to offer.”

The Veeam Solution

To ensure it could offer the same great level of customer service while adding hosting to its offering, One Data selected Kasten K10 to protect its Kubernetes environment.

“Only Kasten K10 felt like it was really natively designed for Kubernetes,” said Julian Breiteneicher. “The user experience, the control panel as well as operations processes and integrations are all optimized for backing up mission-critical containerized workloads in multi-cluster environments.”

The company was also impressed to find out that K10 offered native support for immutable backups, a key feature One Data needed to protect customer data against cyberattacks. “Security is a top priority for us,” said Florian Schöpp. “With Kasten K10 we can protect our Kubernetes clusters easily and make sure that backups are consistent and cannot be deleted or tampered with.”

One Data takes advantage of the deep integration K10 offers with the entire Kubernetes stack. Julian Breiteneicher said: “With K10 we can fully automate the creation of backup policies and set up everything as part of our standardized deployment workflows. Now we no longer have to manually configure data backup tasks, automating this step has made our K10 deployments even more reliable.”

By leveraging Kyverno, an open-source policy engine designed for Kubernetes and integrated with Kasten K10, One Data validates backup configurations and enforces security best practices. The company has gained advanced Infrastructure as Code capabilities that provide security guardrails for mission-critical data analytics workloads.

“With Kasten K10, we can now ensure consistent backups based on snapshots,” said Julian Breiteneicher. “This approach is fast and efficient, so we can protect our containers without downtime and store our backups in a cloud-native, cost-efficient object store we fully control.”

One Data also protects its central collaboration environment, which includes Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange and OneDrive, with Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365. The company now backs up several terabytes of emails and files daily to Microsoft Azure, ensuring business continuity for over 200 users.

With data protection it can rely on, One Data is free to focus on expanding its business. The company is winning additional market share and driving its productivity to new heights. It has also increased its cyber-resilience measures, helping to enable a high level of service continuity.

“Thanks to Kasten K10, we’re benefitting from enterprise-level data protection for our services, ensuring we’re always there for our customers,” said Florian Schöpp. “Using K10 role-based access control, we equip our solution engineers with pre-configured demo environments so they can work more efficiently. It gives us great peace of mind to know we’re better protected against cyberattacks than ever before.”

The Results

  • Helps win new business with 100% reliable, enterprise-grade container backups for the company’s recently launched hosted service.
    “For backups of production workloads in our new offering, we wanted a stable, mature and proven solution that just works,” said Julian Breiteneicher. “And that’s exactly what we got with Kasten K10.”
  • Boosts productivity for solution engineers by enabling them to move fast and reuse pre-configured demo configurations.
    Relying on a fine-grained permission model and using intuitive self-service features, users can adjust backup policies including snapshot frequency and leverage saved application restore points for their own environments.
  • Increases protection against cyberattacks with an optimized security architecture that supports hardened Kubernetes clusters and also covers collaboration data.
    “To increase our infrastructure security, we use a hardened Kubernetes configuration,” said Florian Schöpp. “While some backup solutions require full privileges, K10 works perfectly with restricted access permissions. This facilitates security best practices and boosts the cyber-resiliency of our hosting operations.”

Company:

One Data GmbH is a German software company and a leader in the use of applied artificial intelligence (AI). With over 200 employees in Passau, Munich, Frankfurt and Berlin, One Data offers an AI-powered Data Product Builder for innovative and collaborative data teams, which enables organizations to realize the full potential of their data.

Challenge:

Evolving as a business always carries risk — but can also provide big rewards. When One Data launched its flagship solution One Data – The AI-Powered Data Product Builder as a hosted service, it wanted to ensure reliable protection of customer workloads against cyberthreats and disasters. To support its new venture, the company looked for a comprehensive data protection toolset for containerized, cloud-native workloads, as well as its business-critical collaboration software.

Results:

  • Helps win new business with 100% reliable, enterprise-grade container backups for the company’s recently launched hosted service.
  • Boosts productivity for solution engineers by enabling them to move fast and reuse pre-configured demo configurations.
  • Increases protection against cyberattacks with an optimized security architecture that supports hardened Kubernetes clusters and also covers collaboration data.