Case Study

Client: Salmon Property

Sector: Property Investment

Company Size: 10+

Benefits of Veeam Backup & Replication:

• Significantly reduced data and server recovery times
• Enabled backup archiving with 5-year retention
• Improved protection and recovery against malware and ransomware

Other Services Provided:

• Managed Firewall
• Managed Server
• Managed Desktop
• Office365 E3 with Skype for Business Phone System

To improve the availability, continuity and recovery times of on-premise IT infrastructure:

• Reduce the RTO (recovery time objective) – reduce the time taken to restore on-premise IT infrastructure following loss of data or a disaster
• Improve cyber security resilience – enhance protection against malware and ransomware attack
• Implement GFS backup archiving – enable backup archiving based on GFS (grandfather/father/son) policy

The current backup solution was delivered by the StoreGrid Vembu platform which backed up data-only to an off-site location on a forever forward incremental policy.  Issues with solution were:

• The RTO of servers following an IT disaster was estimated to be 5+ days.  Recovery from data only-backups would require new hardware and servers to be rebuilt before restoring data.
• Recovery from a malware attack was estimated to be 3+ days.  Data would need to be transferred from an off-site location and restored to a local server.
• Forever forward incremental backups do not provide a backup archive.  There was no facility within StoreGrid Vembu to take point in time archive backups using a forever forward policy.

To address the issues with the StoreGrid Vembu solution we implemented the Comis’s Managed Backup & Replication service:

• Installation of a Synology NAS appliance running Veeam Backup & Replication
• Synology NAS not added to Active Directory to protect against malware and ransomware attack
• Configured daily backup jobs of all Hyper-V virtual machines to the Synology NAS
• Configured daily backup copy jobs of all Hyper-V virtual machines from Synology NAS using Comis’ Veeam Cloud Connect off-site platform with GFS backup archiving enabled (4 weeks/3 months/3 quarters/5 years)
• Deployed as part of Comis’ Managed Backup & Replication service which provides backup management including daily backup checks and test restores
• Enable the recovery of virtual machines direct to Microsoft Azure

The benefits of the implementing Comis’s Managed Backup and Replication service were:

• Recovery time objective (RTO) reduced from 5 days to 2 days following physical disaster
• Recovery time objective (RTO) reduced from 5 days to 2 hours following logical disaster
• Recover direct to Microsoft Azure
• Enabled backup archiving to provide historic point in time backups
• Improved protection against malware and ransomware attacks

Our Managed Backup and Replication service is built using Veeam.  Veeam is a leading industry vendor in data protection and restoration and Comis is a Veeam Pro Partner.  We configure Veeam to copy all on-premise virtual machines to a Synology NAS with 30 restore points.  This means that we can restore a virtual on-premise server from any of the last 30 days within hours following a logical disaster.  We also configure a backup job for off-site backups to ensure we can restore virtual servers following a physical disaster and provide a point in time archive backup for the previous 5 years.  Veeam also provides the option to restore virtual machines direct to Microsoft Azure as part of a disaster recovery plan.