Veeam fights ransomware so Insight Global can fill 80,000 jobs annually

The business challenges

Insight Global is a leader in staffing services. The company’s recruiters and account managers cover all employment sectors and skillsets. They identify talent, coordinate interviews and handle onboarding and payroll. Insight Global places roughly 80,000 people in jobs throughout the United States and Canada each year.

“In order to place people in jobs and pay them, our systems and data must be backed up and protected,” said Dave Hudson, Chief Information Officer at Insight Global. “That’s a big responsibility, and we take it very seriously. We’re responsible for people being able to put food on their tables and pay their rent.”

Protecting systems and data is such a high priority that Insight Global created a full-time position focusing solely on backup and disaster recovery. Jordan Tazewell, Disaster Recovery Engineer, works to maintain business continuity as ransomware attacks escalate and cybercriminals show no sign of letting up. In an independent survey of 3,000 business and IT leaders who were asked about their data protection strategies, 76% of them reported at least one ransomware attack in the previous year. Backup repositories were targeted in 94% of those attacks and 36% of their data was unrecoverable.

“Our business can’t run if data is unrecoverable, so we made some changes to our backup strategy,” Tazewell said. “The first thing we did was ensure that the backup solutions we considered offered fundamental features: immutability to protect against ransomware.”

Hudson said a ransomware attack could lead to unplanned downtime, which could be detrimental to the business.

“Downtime might delay a client’s start date for a new job, or it might delay their paycheck,” he explained. “We’re not willing to take that risk, so we upgraded the legacy solutions to Veeam Availability Suite.”

The Veeam solution

Veeam helps Insight Global protect the business from ransomware attacks through immutable backups in Pure Storage and Wasabi. Veeam also recovers data from Pure Storage snapshots significantly faster than the legacy solutions and ensures business continuity in real-life disaster recovery scenarios.

“Our goal is absolute confidence that the business will be able to recover from a ransomware attack or a disaster scenario in as short a time possible,” Hudson said. “Veeam helps us achieve our goal because it gives us the ability to be resilient and maintain business continuity.”

Veeam backs up 100TB across 100 VMware vSphere virtual machines from Pure Storage SafeMode snapshots on premises for immutability and sends backup copies to Wasabi cloud storage for additional immutability.

“Having immutable backups is critical in the fight against ransomware — and having the ability to recover from them quickly is also critical,” Tazewell said. “That’s what separates Veeam from competitors.”

Tazewell said one of his favorite Veeam features is SureBackup because it verifies the recoverability of each backup. Other favorites include storage-level corruption guard, which scans backups to identify and repair corrupt data blocks, and Instant VM Recovery and Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server, which recover data from Pure Storage snapshots quickly and easily.

“Recovery time has decreased significantly with Veeam because it integrates so well with Pure Storage,” Hudson said. “Veeam recovery has proven itself twice already — once during a system failure and a second time following user error. Each time we were able to get up and running in a very short time.”

Tazewell said Veeam also provides useful training resources to help customers like him get the most from each solution, such as Veeam University and technical certification. Veeam offers two types of certifications: Veeam Certified Architect (VMCA) and Veeam Certified Engineer (VMCE), which he is pursuing.

“Veeam empowers customers to be more proactive, whether its data protection in general or ransomware protection in particular,” he said. “Veeam is all about best practices, which helps me be a better administrator.”

The results

• Fights ransomware with immutable backups in Pure Storage and Wasabi
  “We know our backups are reliable, secure and that we can act quickly to recover them,” Hudson said. “Veeam has helped increase our confidence to sustain business operations.”
• Recovers data from Pure Storage snapshots faster than ever before
  “One of the biggest benefits of using Veeam is recoverability,” Tazewell said. “Recovering data is significantly faster with Veeam because it integrates so well with Pure Storage.”
• Ensures business continuity in real-life disaster recovery scenarios
  “Veeam is a dynamic enterprise solution for data protection,” Tazewell said. “It’s easily configurable, scalable and manageable, which helps us continue to protect our business.”