Veeam Software has announced that the Issam Khairy Kabbani Group of Companies (IKK Group) in Saudi Arabia has implemented Veeam Availability Suite and Veeam ONE in order to guarantee uptime of services for all users and customers. The firm’s solutions have increased efficiency of the system engineers, enabling them to focus on enhancements and improvements, besides proving 30% more cost effective than the legacy solution. The introduction of the ‘instant recovery’ feature has cut restore time from days to a few hours.
IKK Group which started operations in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s is a diversified group in terms of products, services, and geography operating in the field of trading, manufacturing and contracting. Today, some 14,000 staff work in 42 independent IKK Group companies, spread over many divisions, branches, and outlets in more than ten countries. The Group’s showrooms, sales offices, factories and R&D offices can be found across the MENA region.
The IKK Group operates a centralised IT department that oversees technology services for all IKK Group lines of business. One of the key concerns of this central IT team is to guarantee uptime of services for all users and customers. “If our data is compromised, or if our services are unavailable, a tremendous number of users and end customers are impacted,” said Ayman Mansour, IT Infrastructure Department Manager, IKK Group. “Service downtime translates to a direct loss of productivity and business.”
With lack of prompt support, rising errors and system incidents, the IKK Group’s legacy backup solution presented a significant business risk.
“Besides a solution that could meet our technical requirements, we needed better support and communications from the vendor itself,” Mansour explained. “Going through partners and facing long delays was no longer viable for us.”
After careful market analysis, the IKK Group selected Veeam Availability Suite to address the technology and support shortcomings it was facing.
The financial benefits were evident immediately. Veeam’s innovative licensing model which bases fees on number of sockets as opposed to terabytes (TB), proved to be 30% more cost-effective than IKK Group’s previous legacy backup solution. Further resource savings have been made possible by Veeam ONE (part of Veeam Availability Suite), which provides the centralised IT team with comprehensive monitoring and analytics for their virtual and physical environments. This has enabled IKK Group to optimise resource planning and maximise utilisations of existing investments as they scale their IT infrastructure.
By reducing backup and recovery process time, errors and issues, Veeam’s solutions enable the IKK Group’s IT team to invest efforts and time into enhancement projects that deliver major business benefits. This includes implementing production and backup data security best practices and access control strengthening to mitigate the threat of malware and cyber risks.
With Veeam’s Instant VM Recovery, large terabyte sized VM servers which used to take days to recover are now done in just a few hours, while services are restored in a few minutes in some cases. This delivers a seamless experience for thousands of users, across the Group’s entities, who rely on the availability of data and services to carry out their job functions.
Equally beneficial has been the relationship that the IKK Group’s IT team shares with Veeam. From their very first engagement, the commitment and expertise of Veeam’s regional team was evident to IKK Group’s centralized IT team, who appreciated the vendor’s ability to deliver dependable, 24/7 support.
“With Veeam, it isn’t just their solutions but also their support that can boost customer satisfaction – you get 24/7 support for incidents whenever needed. If we had to rate Veeam’s regional support, it would be 5-star service most of the time. Today, Veeam is one of the pillars of our service availability and business continuity strategy. If the corporate management decides to establish a DR site, we shall use it an opportunity to extend our relationship with this reliable technology provider,” Mansour said.
“Ensuring data availability and protection is not only essential to business continuity, but also to maintaining competitive advantage, maintaining brand reputation and complying with regulations. As IKK Group transforms its digital infrastructure, we are proud to have been able to provide world class backup and recovery technology that helps deliver secure and uninterrupted digital services and experiences to the Group’s employees, vendors and customers,” concluded Claude Schuck, Regional Manager, Middle East at Veeam.
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