Telefónica Uruguay Chooses Veeam to Enhance Customer Experiences and Mitigate Cyberattacks

The Business Challenge

Telefónica Uruguay recognizes that technology now plays a key role in human connection, making its services an essential part of life for customers. To inspire trust and grow its market share, the company aims to provide the best network in the industry, differentiated by high levels of availability and customer service.

“Our goal is to exceed customer expectations,” said Jose Acuña, IT Operations Manager at Telefónica Uruguay. “For the IT team, this means ensuring that our employees always have the data at hand to respond to customer requests quickly and efficiently.”

Telefónica Uruguay is entrusted with huge amounts of customer data; a responsibility that the company takes seriously. With a fast-evolving threat landscape, Telefónica Uruguay continually adapts and augments its data security strategy.

“Mitigating and preventing cyberattacks has always been a high priority for us,” explained Acuña. “But we also needed to ensure we could recover fast and comprehensively in the event of anything bringing our systems down. Years ago, the company looked for a solution that would ensure it was prepared for any eventuality.”

Specifically, the Telefónica Uruguay IT team found that backup and restore times were becoming unacceptably long, posing a risk to network availability and, in turn, the customer experience. The company searched for a solution that would ensure it was prepared for any event.

The Veeam Solution

Following a review of data protection offerings in the market, Telefónica Uruguay found that one option stood out: Veeam Availability Suite.

“Veeam gave us the chance to try out the technology for ourselves,” said Acuña. “The experience convinced us that Veeam was the right choice from a wide range of vendors, including all major vendors of these types of solutions.”

Telefónica Uruguay worked with partner UruData to deploy Veeam Availability Suite within the planned timelines and budget. The company uses the solution to back up 600 virtual machines and 200 physical machines.

“We’ve teamed up with UruData on many projects and we value their advice and consultancy services,” commented Acuña. “Veeam proved very easy to implement and integrate with our VMware and Windows environments. Using Veeam, it was easy to set up a sophisticated data protection strategy where our most critical data is backed up daily, with weekly and monthly backups for other systems.”

So far, Telefónica Uruguay has used Veeam to restore data that was accidentally deleted or corrupted, and to make copies of production systems for testing. In the event of a cyberattack, the company now has an extra line of defense against interruption to its services, at a far lower cost than capitulating to a ransomware demand.

“The beauty of Veeam is that it allows for an extremely granular data restore, so we can recover a single email rather than restoring an entire system,” said Acuña. “Thanks to Veeam, we can now respond to a major event such as a ransomware attack by restoring data fast, which provides a huge boost to our service continuity. High availability is one of the biggest promises that we make to our customers – and with Veeam, we can deliver.”

The Results

• Enables backups in a fraction of the previous time, supporting 24/7 network availability:
  Using Veeam Availability Suite, Telefónica Uruguay increased its backup success rate and reduced the time that IT staff spend administering backups dramatically, contributing to higher efficiency.
• Elevates service to customers through granular restore of essential data:
  “Thanks to Veeam, we can now restore a single email in minutes instead of the hours it would take to recover that data in the past,” said Acuña. “By delivering this information to our customer service teams faster, we help them provide a more agile response.”
• Minimizes data loss in the event of a disaster, protecting customers from disruption:
  Telefónica Uruguay reduced its recovery point objective (RPO) to less than 24 hours with Veeam technology.