ITK Engineering slashes time-to-market for exciting new innovations with Veeam

ITK Engineering operates in a fast-moving, crowded market, where success depends on beating competitors to market. The company’s pioneering control software and system solutions are used by companies in a wide range of industries to reduce complexity, enhance safety and boost efficiency.

“We aim to help our customers capture competitive advantage by pushing the boundaries with automation,” said Jan Fox-Gerlach, Information Coordination at ITK Engineering GmbH. “For example, we’re working on autonomous driving systems that promise to transform the transportation sector. We develop software for medical robotics that are changing the face of surgery, nursing and rehabilitation. Our software also helps manufacturing clients run tomorrow’s factories and execute Industry 4.0 projects.”

To develop its innovative software solutions, ITK Engineering collaborates closely with its customers, exchanging large amounts of data as it works towards a final product. Without consistent, fast access to data, the company can lose its first-to-market advantage, affecting the bottom line for both ITK Engineering and its customers.

“We’re always looking for ways to enable our developers to work faster and smarter,” said Fox-Gerlach. “Just as we seek to enhance productivity and efficiency for our customers, we adopt a culture of ongoing optimization. Our work is very data-intensive, so we made empowering developers with the data they need a top priority.”

In pursuit of efficiency gains, ITK Engineering rolled out new containerization and collaboration tools. At the same time, the company saw its overall data grow rapidly and sharing of larger data sets became the norm. These factors led ITK Engineering to look to extend its data protection capabilities.

We’ve made a lot of changes to our IT environment in recent months,” said Fox-Gerlach. “We deployed two clusters of the SUSE Rancher Kubernetes management platform, each with ten nodes to build and train our artificial intelligence [AI] and machine learning [ML] solutions. Our developers and customers were exchanging larger data sets via Microsoft 365. Overall, we’re expecting our data to grow by 30TB within the next few months. We wanted to continue to enable data sharing and top-notch data security for our rapidly evolving IT environment.”

A long-time user of Veeam to protect its virtualized IT environment, ITK Engineering opted to extend its Veeam footprint with Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 and Kasten K10 for Kubernetes.

“We’ve long used Veeam Data Platform to back up our entire VMware vCenter landscape, which includes approximately 125 virtual machines on 23 physical servers with 140TB of critical data,” said Fox-Gerlach. “We wanted the same great, powerful data protection features we’ve benefitted from for our VMs tailored for Microsoft 365 and our containers, so Veeam was a natural choice.”

ITK Engineering will protect Microsoft 365 data for its global users with Veeam, creating local backups for rapid recovery in the event of a service outage. The company will store backups for all cloud data oftine on tape storage, providing additional protection from cyberattack.

“Using Veeam, we’ll be able to recover individual emails and files without having to restore entire mailboxes or file servers,” said Fox-Gerlach. “Microsoft 365 is an essential collaboration tool for our employees, so it gives us great peace of mind to know that it is now protected by Veeam.”

ITK Engineering is using Kasten K10 for Kubernetes to now back up, restore and clone its cloud-native services quickly and easily, including all configuration settings and files. The solution enables the company to adopt best practices for Kubernetes, which include simplifying and automating storage management.

“Thanks to Kasten by Veeam, we’re streamlining administration of our Kubernetes environment and accelerating deployments,” said Fox-Gerlach. “Best of all, we benefit from comprehensive end-to-end security, so we can innovate without worrying about cyber-threats. We’re moving more mission-critical DevOps and CI/CD services to our Kubernetes clusters, making backup and recovery of container applications an essential capability across all our teams.”

Looking to the future, ITK Engineering plans to explore a range of additional use cases for Kasten K10, including migration of services between clusters and platforms, public and hybrid cloud deployments.

“Alongside our customers, we push the boundaries of what software can do,” said Fox-Gerlach. “By protecting every facet of our environment with Veeam, from VMs to containers to Microsoft 365, we have the immediate access to data we need to maintain our position at the leading edge.”

• Instant recovery enables 10TB server restore in just five minutes, empowering developers to bring new products and features to market sooner. 
  Veeam offers instant recovery features that allow us to minimize downtime,” said Fox-Gerlach. “As a result, our developers can work with as little interruption as possible and drive down time-to-market.”
• Deployment of Kasten K10 in a single day cut time-to-value for the new solution, enabling an immediate impact on productivity. 
  ITK Engineering implemented Kasten K10 in a single day, improving developer experience immediately. The company’s IT team no longer needs to work overtime at weekends to create consistent backups of cloud-native Kubernetes workloads.
• Reduces risk and facilitates compliance by protecting all of the company’s Microsoft 365 users around the world against ransomware. 
  Veeam improved our security and business continuity,” said Fox-Gerlach. “We can restore files easily and protect all on-premises and cloud data effectively against cyber-threats such as ransomware. Veeam helps us pass all our IT security audits successfully.”