Arche thwarts malware attacks and achieves advanced cyber resiliency with Veeam

Residential real estate is an industry in which almost every transaction may represent one of the most significant events in someone’s life. Whether they are finding the perfect apartment to rent, or investing their life savings in a forever home, Arche’s customers depend on them to support them through what can be an emotionally and financially exhausting time.

François Amiraux, IT manager at Q1C1 — the IT services subsidiary of Arche — said: “Our customers rely on prompt, professional service in our branches. Any interruption in the smooth running of our information systems could have a significant impact on high-value transactions involving multiple people, which makes backup and recovery real priorities for our business.”

Smooth customer service at Arche depends on the company’s employees having access to a broad range of business applications. These enable communication with customers and management of real estate dealings, and include both commercial software packages and applications developed in-house.

“Our IT landscape comprises more than 600 Virtual Machines (VMs) running a diverse portfolio of business applications on several different operating systems,” said Amiraux. “We need to ensure that these applications and their data are available to our employees, so that they can offer uninterrupted service to customers.”

Arche uses Veeam to provide the high data availability that enables it to always be there for its customers. The company has a long and successful track record of relying on Veeam.

“We have used Veeam for more than a decade, without a single significant problem in all that time,” said Amiraux. “We manage the backup and recovery of our entire virtualized server landscape with Veeam. Anytime we want to restore a VM, the solution always works.”

At each of its two private Tier 2+ data centers, Arche deployed Veeam in a stretched cluster protecting VMware VMs hosted on eight physical servers — i.e. 16 physical servers in total. The organization uses Veeam Direct Storage

Access to read/write data directly from/to full-flash storage arrays for high performance. It takes advantage of data snapshots on the arrays to minimize the impact of backups on production systems. There is also a second, smaller Veeam environment — kept separate for security reasons — that manages backups of all remote branches that use Hyper-V virtualization.

Arche uses the same backup regime for all its VMs, backing up the entire production and pre-production landscape every night. The backup process for all 315 TB of data typically takes two and a half hours, three at most.

“Our whole disaster recovery plan is built around Veeam: we know that our infrastructure is powerful enough to restore a minimum of 50 VMs at a time, so we can quickly get the most important systems running again,” said Amiraux. “We also make significant use of more granular recovery for individual emails, Active Directory accounts or files. Veeam corresponds precisely to our expectations and our needs.”

Fortunately, Arche has never needed to perform a large-scale restoration of VMs, but has successfully used its Veeam solution to recover individual VMs and roll systems back to their last clean state. In a few cases, this was in response to isolated attacks involving cryptolocker malware at remote branches. Arche is proactive in including backup and recovery as a part of their cyber resilience plan and overall IT security posture, and a key element is making sure that any data restored is free from security issues. In organizational terms, Arche ensures that its Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and the entire security team are involved in every project, rigorously validating processes in collaboration with the security unit to ensure alignment with the company’s predefined policy and governance standards. This seamless collaboration is made possible by having the cybersecurity team report directly to the Chief Information Officer (CIO), which helps the organization maintain operational continuity and deliver a user-friendly experience.

“The integrated antivirus in Veeam allows us to scan backups before we restore them, which is a great benefit in terms of speed and confidence. It allows us to increase cyber resiliency, which is essential in today’s world,” said Amiraux.

Veeam’s simple yet powerful user interface represents another plus point for Arche — it helps keep administration time to a minimum and makes it easier to onboard new personnel.

“The interface is really super, so training is very simple,” said Amiraux. “But simplicity doesn’t mean lack of power: as our environment has grown, we’ve become more adept at using the advanced functionality within Veeam. That has enabled us to keep real estate transactions running smoothly for our customers over many years.”

• Enables the protection of more than 600 virtual machines through a single intuitive interface.
  Our customers depend on us to help their property transactions run smoothly — the last thing they want is for our systems to be unavailable at a critical point, which could have serious financial consequences,” said Amiraux. “With Veeam, we have a powerful solution that makes it easy to protect our large landscape of VMs and recover working systems in a matter of seconds.”
• Safeguards 315 TB of data nightly within a tight backup window of less than three hours.
  It’s vital to respect the backup window: there are a number of scripts and updates that need to run overnight, and we can’t afford to have those impinging on the working day,” said Amiraux. “With Veeam, the rapid backup means that our employees always enjoy responsive systems during working hours.”
• Ensures daily transactions of many millions of euros go through without interruption.
  The key benefit of using Veeam is the serenity that comes from knowing your most important systems are protected and can be recovered quickly in the event of a problem,” said Amiraux. “Our landscape today is stable and offers high performance, so we continue to be really happy with Veeam.”