For complex e-mail admin, cloud technology is the only way to go for Trianel

Trianel – For complex e-mail admin, cloud technology is the only way to go.

Trianel, a municipal utilities cooperation, was founded in 1999 to pool the interests of different municipal utilities and reinforce their independence and competitiveness in the energy market. Over 100 municipal shareholders and partners in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands benefit from this structure. Its more than 300 employees support municipal utilities along the entire energy value chain, from generation and procurement to trading in electricity and gas—even digital energy solutions are covered. Trianel’s partners especially value the expertise in energy generation, trade and sales provided by these employees. In addition, the cooperation brings together the activities of its various municipalities and actively helps shape the energy market.

Project details.

Services

Cloud

Industry

Trade / Service

Manufacturer

Veeam, Microsoft

Company size

250 – 1,500 employees

Starting point.

Over the course of a single day, Trianel processes some 25,000 e-mails relating to electricity and gas trading as well as other business correspondence. Vast quantities of data are exchanged by e-mail each day, particularly with respect to electricity and gas trading, managing utility companies’ procurement and sales portfolios, and controlling generation plants. This data ensures that automated processes continue to function and that risk is properly controlled. Trianel and its customers therefore require a constantly available, secure IT network that can handle these data exchanges with little administrative work and low costs.

Project objectives.

Trianel chose a cloud solution to ensure that it would have 24/7 access to a secure IT network with few administrative tasks and low costs. No longer interested in lifecycle agreements, Trianel wanted to use exclusively cloud-based applications while maintaining high data and IT security standards. To do this, the Office 365 applications used by Trianel, along with their various services, had to be securely hosted. The backup system also had to be optimised. Trianel therefore moved its entire local infrastructure into the cloud.

We didn’t want to manage local backups or licences anymore. Instead, we wanted a cloud-only infrastructure. That being said, our data needed to be completely safe and available at all times. Bechtle identified Microsoft Azure and Veeam Backup as the perfect cloud and backup solution for us.

Peter Wallace, Senior IT Infrastructure Manager, Trianel GmbH

Solution.

The cloud solution Bechtle selected for Trianel was Microsoft Azure, supported by Veeam Backup. Microsoft Azure technology provides a just-right cloud system, featuring upgradeable cloud services. Over 150 Azure Logic Apps connectors can be quickly linked up, including Office 365, which is crucial to Trianel’s business. Bechtle set up Office 365 and e-mail in the Azure cloud for Trianel, then migrated all user e-mail accounts. To ensure that all data would be backed up, Bechtle installed Veeam Backup, in line with Trianel’s cloud-only strategy. This fulfilled one of Trianel’s key requirements, namely to get rid of the hassle of downloading and uploading backups when performing data recovery.

To do this, Bechtle installed and configured a Veeam backup server with a connected storage account directly in the Azure cloud. Virtual machines on Microsoft Azure are backed up using Veeam Backup and Replication— a fully cloud-based backup software. Thanks to its new Cloud Mobility recovery solution, Veeam Backup and Replication can simply port data to Azure for recovery. Bechtle set up Veeam Backup for Office 365 to backup data from e-mails, SharePoint and OneDrive, as well as Microsoft Teams pages, directly in the cloud.

The software ensures that Office 365 is always available by saving all SharePoint, OneDrive for Business and Exchange data on cloud-based virtual machines and, if necessary, recovering them directly at any time. Keeping costs down was a priority: Bechtle optimised the backup server in Azure by developing a feature that automatically shuts down the server after backing up cloud data, restarting it at night for the next backup. This significantly reduces the costs associated with the server‘s runtime, as payment for Microsoft Azure Cloud is based on a pay-as-you-use model. Altogether, Bechtle was able to implement this backup solution within Azure Cloud in three days.

Business benefits.

Microsoft Azure lets Trianel deploy new features and applications more quickly, effortlessly connecting applications, data and devices. Veeam Backup in Azure ensures that all applications and related data are safe and always available. In addition, the solution is cost-effective and scalable at will, with little administrative work involved.