Vicinity Centres protects a hybrid multi-cloud environment with Veeam

Approximately two thirds of Australians live within a 30-minute drive from one of Vicinity’s retail destinations. From Chadstone – The Fashion Capital in Melbourne to Queen Victoria Building in Sydney, the company’s portfolio includes some of the most iconic shopping centers in Australia. As the company continues to evolve to meet the needs and wants of its communities, its retail precincts are increasingly complemented by working spaces, and entertainment precincts. Vicinity’s Platform Team ensures that the group has the technology implemented to achieve its strategic goals.

“Everything my team does is in support of the group’s overarching strategy to transform the way Australians live, work and play, shaping meaningful places where communities connect,” said Ljuba Butcher, Manager of Platform Team, Vicinity. “In recent years, this has included adopting a hybrid multi-cloud IT environment. The drivers behind this move include giving us the ability to scale up and down according to business needs and to deploy computing resources faster.”

As Vicinity added AWS, Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 footprints to its IT environment, maintaining high data availability was as important as ever — but also more challenging.

“It’s important that we can respond quickly to requests from the business to recover data if needed,” said Ljuba Butcher. “We’re also subject to regulations that require us to demonstrate that we have a robust data retention strategy in place. When we began adding cloud workloads, we started looking for a data protection solution that was suited to a hybrid multi-cloud environment and gave us data freedom. Since we have a relatively small Platform team serving over a thousand users, it had to be easy to use and integrate with other technologies.”

Vicinity selected Veeam to protect data across its IT environment, regardless of whether it was hosted in the AWS or Microsoft Azure clouds or on-premises. With 12 years of experience using Veeam for on-premises workloads, the decision was a natural choice. In more recent years, Vicinity has been augmenting its VMware environment with cloud-first infrastructure.

“Our journey with Veeam started over a decade ago, and along the way Veeam has grown and evolved alongside Vicinity’s requirements,” said Ljuba Butcher. “In the past we had multiple platforms for data protection including Commvault and IBM Spectrum Protect alongside Veeam. We started by backing up VMs in our data centers with Veeam, progressed to using Veeam replication for our disaster recovery, and we are now consolidating on Veeam as our data protection platform of choice because it offers ease-of-use, high-quality support and flexibility.”

Using features built into Veeam, Vicinity was able to seamlessly start backing up workloads in AWS and Microsoft Azure. It also simplified and improved protection for its business-critical Microsoft 365 environment with Veeam.

“We approached Veeam when we started our cloud migration from VMware to ask how they could support us,” said Ljuba Butcher. “It quickly became clear that Veeam could offer the data freedom we were looking for, allowing us to restore from one cloud provider to another if we wanted to. Backing up Microsoft 365 with Veeam was also a no-brainer as far as we were concerned. We’re big users of all the Microsoft 365 apps, from Teams to SharePoint to OneDrive to Exchange, including 100TB of high-value data across all business functions, so it was vital that we had rock-solid protection for that part of our environment too. We were confident Veeam could deliver — and it has, giving us the confidence to restore Microsoft 365 data rapidly in the event of a disaster or cyberattack.”

By taking advantage of Veeam’s intuitive management functionality, the Vicinity Platform team is ensuring 24/7 data availability for the group. The team is also appreciative of Veeam’s responsive support.

“My team tell me that rolling out Veeam patches for AWS backups is easy — you click install and they just work,” said Ljuba Butcher. “In general, maintenance with Veeam is a breeze. And whenever we’ve contacted Veeam support, they’ve been really reactive and knowledgeable compared to other vendors we’ve had to deal with. Even team members that have never used Veeam before have got to grips with it straight away.”

Veeam also proved adaptable when the team received an unexpected request following the AWS migration. “A month ago, a team contacted us to ask why they couldn’t access a database anymore,” said Ljuba Butcher. “It transpired that this database was sitting on a server that was so rarely used we hadn’t copied it over. Using Veeam, it was as easy as finding the relevant backup, restoring the database in question, and giving the team the information they wanted.”

• 12 years using Veeam and counting demonstrates how Veeam has evolved alongside Vicinity and its use of data.
  From backing up VMs in its data centers with Veeam, to using Veeam replication for disaster recovery, Veeam is now the group’s platform of choice for data protection regardless of where it is located.
• Reduced management time of over 10+ hours a week for data protection drastically with a central point of control for AWS, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365 and on-premises workloads.
  “In the past we had a handful of data protection tools aside from Veeam including Commvault and IBM Spectrum Protect, On a bad day, it used to take multiple employees two to three hours per day to babysit the many backup products we had installed,” said Ljuba Butcher. “Now that we’ve consolidated onto Veeam, we’ve cut that management time to an hour or less per day for one staff member, which is a dramatic difference.
• Zero learning curve for new users of Veeam helps Vicinity boost utilization of resources.
  “More than half my team had never used Veeam in their lives before they came to Vicinity,” said Ljuba Butcher. “Every time, the feedback has been ‘it’s so intuitive and easy to use,’ so we don’t have to spend time training them. Some of the tools we used in the past like Commvault took multiple training sessions and more time to upskill our team.