“It’s Veeam or nothing!” — YNCORIS refuses to compromise on data protection

The chemical industry underpins many other sectors. From consumer goods to construction and from medicine to agriculture, much of the modern world depends on chemical products.

By their nature, chemical plants are complicated to operate, and typically include complex equipment. YNCORIS, a service provider to the chemical industry, has won significant market share by helping chemical companies to overcome this complexity.

“Our strengths lie in efficient planning, construction and operational support for our customers,” said Matthias Häßner, IT Infrastructure at YNCORIS. “The YNCORIS mission is to rethink industrial services, with the long-term viability of our customers as the ultimate goal.”

Before YNCORIS can optimize its customers’ operations, it must ensure that its own business runs smoothly. As the company expanded, this became more of a challenge.

“We’re located in a major industry hub: around 260 chemicals companies of all sizes have their operations in this region,” said Häßner. “That means we’re surrounded by opportunity. But as we onboarded new customers, we experienced growing pains in terms of our IT infrastructure. Suddenly, we had so many more applications to deal with, and our data volumes shot up.”

Previously, YNCORIS relied on two sets of data protection solutions and processes for each of its physical and virtual server environments: Micro Focus Data Protector and Veeam, respectively. The two-vendor approach, however, was not ideal especially with the company’s expansion plans.

“In the IT infrastructure team, enabling business continuity is a big priority, since it’s a requirement for reliable service to our customers,” said Häßner. “And the stakes are extremely high in the chemical industry, since just a few minutes of downtime can have serious consequences on our customers’ revenues or costs, or a knock-on effect on the industries that rely on their products. We were also acutely aware of the growing threat of ransomware and other cyber-threats, so we decided it was time to select a single powerful data protection solution for both physical and virtual servers.”

YNCORIS decided that consolidating to Veeam Data Platform for comprehensive data protection was the ideal option. The company didn’t make its selection lightly, running a thorough evaluation of offerings from different vendors.

“We originally chose Veeam for our virtual environment because of the deep integration with VMware — it was the obvious choice,” said Häßner. “It’s been a winner ever since then, scaling up seamlessly as we’ve added new workloads and data. We continue to benefit from the close relationship between Veeam and VMware, getting new tools and security patches sooner than we would otherwise. It was easy to extend Veeam to our physical servers too — so much so, that I wish we had done it earlier.”

By taking advantage of built-in Veeam features, YNCORIS is automating data backups for its entire IT environment from a single point of control. Moreover, the company can ensure that backups are verified and unaffected by application or virtual machine (VM) crashes.

“It’s Veeam functionality like SureBackup and Application-Aware Processing that really takes the heat off of my team,” said Häßner. “Thanks to Veeam, we can ensure that we can actually restore from our backups before we need them, giving us great peace of mind. For our most critical workloads, we run those checks daily. We also don’t have to worry about our backups being inconsistent if an app or VM suddenly goes down — Veeam has thought of that already!”

Häßner and his team rely on Veeam to provide immediate visibility of the status of data protection measures across the growing company. They use these insights to power better decisions about infrastructure planning and resource optimization.

“Every month, I sit down with my team for a review of our IT infrastructure,” said Häßner. “Thanks to the reports generated by Veeam, we barely mention operational matters related to data protection — it just works. Instead, we can move the conversation onto topics that are more valuable to the business and our customers.”

For the next step in its data protection journey, YNCORIS is using Veeam to orchestrate its recovery processes in the event of a disaster.

“If we’re activating our disaster recovery [DR] measures, we’re in a high-stress, high-pressure situation such as a cyber-attack or natural disaster,” said Häßner. “So, anything we can do to simplify the process is helpful. By automating DR workflows and testing with Veeam, we can keep cool heads, avoid errors and get our systems up and running ASAP. In turn, that will minimize impact on our customers, who depend on us to be there for them 24/7.”

YNCORIS also turned to Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 to ensure critical data is protected and recoverable for its applications, which many of its employees rely on to collaborate and work productively. The company opted for a managed service from Veeam partner S&L — a CANCOM Company.

“Since Microsoft 365 apps are central to many of our employees’ everyday work, we were eager to use Veeam to protect this part of our environment too,” said Häßner. “When we discovered that S&L uses Wasabi Cloud Storage with a data center in Frankfurt, we realized that their managed service would be a cost-effective way to comply with the European Union General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR] and we were convinced.”

YNCORIS continues to add new services to its portfolio and expand its customer base. As the company grows, Veeam is providing scalable, far- reaching data protection capabilities that help minimize risk.

“No one knows what the future holds for the chemical industry,” said Häßner. “But by building a rock-solid, agile IT environment with solutions such as Veeam, we’re ready for whatever’s next for us and our customers. Now, whenever we take on anything related to data, I tell our customers: it’s Veeam or nothing!”

• Reduced backup administration significantly by standardizing on one powerful solution for physical and virtual data workloads. 
  Using Veeam, we centralized and accelerated backup processes for 450 virtual machines and 15 physical servers,” said Häßner. “It’s an IT team’s dream to have one easy-to-use data protection solution for an entire, diverse IT environment, and Veeam delivers that.”
• Maximized business continuity for YNCORIS and its customers by slashing risk of data loss and automating disaster recovery. 
  YNCORIS decreased the risk of business disruption in the event of a cyber- attack or natural disaster significantly with Veeam, helping it serve its customers 24/7.
• Removed barriers to expansion through scalable, flexible data protection measures. 
  YNCORIS is free to take on growth opportunities, confident that it can easily extend Veeam to protect new workloads, regardless of what or where they’re running.