The challenge.
The SNF had an exclusively on-premises Veeam backup infrastructure and wanted to protect itself from potential data loss in the event of a major disaster at its Bern site. At the same time, the migration of a number of services to the cloud required the implementation of a backup infrastructure.
The backup infrastructure consisted of several server elements and secondary storage distributed in two computer rooms allowing duplication and off-site tape storage in accordance with the company’s SLA.
Our client migrated some of its services to the cloud at the same time.
“Following an audit, we were advised to move our data backups off-site too, for greater security but also to reduce costs. We followed this advice and are now in compliance with these recommendations,” explains Patrick Vuagniaux.
The solution.
There were several aims of this Storage as a Service project. Firstly, to ensure automated off-site storage of each backup set. Secondly, to reduce the criticality of tape backup sets by duplicating data externally, and to guarantee the immutability of these backup sets in order to protect against ransomware / CryptoLocker type attacks. And finally, to ensure the the data generated is backed up via an enterprise tool and stored in the cloud.
Our Bechtle experts proposed building on the existing backup infrastructure and adding an additional component off the Bern site. Thus, we had to qualify the precise technical requirements and scale the appropriate solution, taking into account the necessary prerequisites as well as the growth factors for the years to come.
To support this additional component, a solution in the form of managed services charged on a monthly terabyte basis, based on object storage hosted in our Brainserve Tier IV data centre was recommended. A private tenant for SNF was made available to host the backup data in the form of a Storage as a Service offering.
Our teams then reconfigured the existing backup solution to enable the off-site storage of backup sets to object storage.
In parallel, our experts deployed the Veeam Backup for Office 365 solution to enable the backup of e-mail, Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint to object storage.
We then provided a Storage as a Service managed service supporting the provision of storage, solution monitoring and troubleshooting. To this end, an engineer was made available to configure the Veeam global backup solution and to set up a VPN tunnel to secure the connection between SNF and Brainserve.
This StaaS project is the ninth that we have conducted together, and was a bit different from the others. Indeed, the deployment of the project was very fast, given its content. The contractual part being the most complicated and time-consuming, we needed a partner who would listen to our needs, who was flexible and adaptable. In addition, the consulting phase was very important—everything had to be well orchestrated, we needed to be guided, advised and supported, which is always what the Bechtle teams give us. If I had one piece of advice for setting up such a project, it would be to get the right partner, because then everything is just a click away.
Benefits.
“The solution offered by Bechtle experts provides us with the necessary and appropriate flexibility through consumption on demand. We were also able to comply with the recommendations made to us during our audit. Storing data off-site has made it possible to increase security, particularly with data encryption. Additionally, we now have access to a turnkey service five days a week with access to the support desk of Bechtle Switzerland’s Managed Services Business Unit, which is particularly useful during holiday periods when some staff are away,” concludes Patrick Vuagniaux.