Customer Case Study
The Business Challenge
Business continuity planning is more than smart business. It’s the key to surviving a disaster. Unfortunately, many companies don’t take a proactive approach to business continuity planning.
Milhouse Engineering & Construction, Inc. took a proactive approach to business continuity planning. After the IT team replaced legacy backup with Cloud Backup powered by Veeam, which became the backbone of the firm’s disaster recovery plan, the Executive team focused on creating a business continuity plan. For Milhouse, business continuity means delivering engineering, architecture, and construction management services to clients despite a disaster, with minimum business disruption.
“We’re fortunate to have tech-savvy executives who recognize that IT plays a major role in business continuity,” said Amar Singh, Director of IT at Milhouse Engineering & Construction, Inc. “They asked us what challenges remained in our disaster recovery plan, and we explained that onsite backup and recovery were solid, but offsite backup and recovery were not.”
Veeam was taking care of onsite backup and recovery. Daily backup was reliable and recovery was fast. No problem there. The challenge was getting backup copies offsite. They were being backed up to a USB hard drive and transported to an offsite repository by car each week. If the hard drive was lost en route, a week’s worth of data would be lost as well.
“We’re a service-based firm; whereas we can’t deliver services to clients if our data isn’t available,” Amar Singh explained. “If we lost a week’s worth of data, the firm could lose up to $500,000 in revenue per week.” The IT team advised the Executive team the best way to ensure data availability from offsite backups was cloud backup. Milhouse already had a conduit to the cloud—Veeam Cloud Connect—a feature in Veeam that transfers backups offsite to a hosted cloud repository through a secure sockets layer connection. The challenge was finding a reliable cloud provider with expertise in recovery.
The Veeam Solution
Milhouse chose CyberFortress, an award-winning cloud provider that customizes backup and disaster recovery solutions for companies of all sizes. “Veeam and CyberFortress provide consistent, reliable offsite backup and recovery, making our data available 24.7.365,” Amar Singh said. “Our business continuity plan depends on 24.7.365 availability.”
Veeam and CyberFortress help Milhouse avoid data loss, which helps prevent revenue loss. Replacing weekly offsite backup via the USB hard drive with daily Veeam backup to CyberFortress enables the firm to protect approximately $500,000 in probable revenue per week. That’s how much Milhouse might have forfeited if a week’s worth of data was lost.
“Small businesses don’t always think through the worst-case scenario,” Amar Singh said. “Losing a week’s worth of data can damage a company. Backing up to CyberFortress with Veeam gives us the ability to restore critical systems in a worst-case scenario, keep the business going and preserve $500,000 in revenue.” Veeam and CyberFortress also enable Milhouse to follow the 3-2-1 backup rule recommended for disaster recovery (3 copies of data stored on 2 types of media, with 1 copy offsite).
“All we had to do to master the 3-2-1 rule was point our backups to CyberFortress— it was that easy—plug and play,” Amar Singh said. “We have complete visibility and control of our backups, and we can access and recover data directly from the backup console, whether the data is in our data center or the cloud.”
Milhouse spent minutes using Instant Virtual Machine Recovery to restore a business-critical file server containing engineering models, drawings, Microsoft Word documents and Excel spreadsheets for an onsite backup. Without Veeam, Amar said recovery would have taken a week, leaving employees without access to their work.
CyberFortress was one of the first cloud providers to embrace Veeam Cloud Connect and join the Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) program. CyberFortress was also one of the first providers to become a platinum partner. CyberFortress was Veeam Partner of the Year 2019. With tens-of-thousands of physical and virtual machines under Veeam protection, CyberFortress is a trusted provider of cloud backup with unmatched expertise and knowledge.
Amar Singh said a benefit of working with Veeam and CyberFortress is the exceptional customer support offered by both companies. “From the time I spoke with CyberFortress to understand the benefits of offsite backup copies, I knew they were the best fit for Milhouse,” Amar Singh said.
“When I found out CyberFortress was a Veeam Platinum Partner, I was even more convinced. Vendor support sometimes goes by the wayside, but not with Veeam and CyberFortress. Their support teams are awesome. They help us resolve issues, and they follow up to see if the issues remain resolved.”
CyberFortress is a global provider of highly available and secure cloud data protection solutions, including Infrastructure (IaaS), Disaster Recovery (DRaaS) and Backup (BaaS). We deliver best in class data protection and availability solutions built on market leading technology. Our global footprint spans across North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand meeting our diverse customer compliance needs, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA.
The Results
- Master the 3-2-1 rule with cloud backup
- Avoid the risk of catastrophic data loss
- Prevent $500,000 in lost revenue per week
Company:
Milhouse Engineering & Construction, Inc.
Location:
Chicago, IL
Website:
milhouseinc.com
Business:
Full-service engineering and architecture firm
Challenge:
Offsite backup and recovery were inconsistent and unreliable, halting operatons
Solution:
Cloud Backup powered by Veeam + Cloud to Cloud Office 365 protection powered by Veeam
Benefits:
Keeping Milhouse Construction operational and saving them up to $500,000 weekly by providing the ability to deliver services by having data availabl
“We’re a service-based
firm; whereas we can’t deliver
services to our clients if our
data isn’t available .”
-AMAR SINGH, DIRECTOR OF IT,
MILHOUSE CONSTRUCTION
“Losing a week’s worth of data can damage a company. Backing up to CyberFortress with Veeam gives us the ability to restore critical systems in a worst-case scenario, keep the business going and preserve $500,000 in revenue.”
“Veeam and CyberFortress provide consistent, reliable offsite backup and recovery, making our data available 24.7.365.”
“Vendor support sometimes goes by the wayside, but not with Veeam and CyberFortress. Their support teams are awesome. They help us resolve issues, and they follow up to see if the issues remain resolved.”
