German Marketing Agency Serviceplan Chooses Veeam

Veeam Software, Inc. announced that Serviceplan Group, an owner-manager and partner-managed agency group in Europe, has chosen Veeam to protect its project and customer data, enable operational efficiency and ensure compliance.

Serviceplan is a, integrated communications agency in Germany. The group includes 40 specialist agencies that work on many customer projects and employs around 4,000 people across 24 locations worldwide. Most of the IT applications for individual subsidiaries and international locations are centered in Munich, where the agency group operates out of two redundant data centers. The group’s Hyper-V environment currently comprises of more than 400 VMs with a storage capacity of around 2PB.

Serviceplan prides itself on flexibility, agility and meeting the needs of its clients, and it relies on data availability for its success. While most of the creative applications for graphic design, image processing and film editing run on their own network, it increasingly relies on cloud solutions like Office 365 for communication and collaboration. For their project management, for example, many agency employees use Microsoft Teams. Serviceplan selected Veeam Backup for Office 365 and Veeam Backup & Replication to secure all its data from Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams in its own data center.

“Office 365 offers us excellent opportunities for teamwork and communication with customers. However, we are ourselves responsible for backing up the data stored in the Microsoft cloud on a regular basis. To ensure that customer service is not compromised, we also need to be able to make data that has already been deleted from the Microsoft cloud accessible for years to come,” said Stefan Reitmeier, senior technical manager, Serviceplan.

The scalable backup and replication capabilities that Veeam provides guarantees the simple and fast restore of individual e-mails and files. Any Office 365 object can be located and granularity restored with a few clicks. Serviceplan can meet all retention obligations for its customers and reliably protect project and client data vs. any loss, accidental deletion, security threats and gaps in retention policies.

“Our teams need access to all project data and digital content at all times. Customers often request information about previous projects years later. We must therefore continue to be able to retrieve this data reliably,” Reitmeier said.

Serviceplan also uses Veeam Backup & Replication to secure its virtual server infrastructure.

“The production of digital content such as ultra HD videos for advertising campaigns creates unbelievably large amounts of data. The solution has proven itself because it interacts excellently with Hyper-V and also copes well with our very large data volumes,” added Reitmeier. “Even huge file servers with a volume of over 100TB can be restarted from the backup within minutes after a failure. This enables us to achieve extremely short restore times for critical business applications.“

The agency group estimates that backing up virtual servers and Office 365 data with Veeam is 70% more efficient than cloud-based backup. Over a period of five years, several hundred thousand euros in storage costs can be saved.

“Serviceplan operates in a competitive environment, where Availability and data protection is critical to its services. Our reliable, high-speed data recovery and streamlined DR gives customers the confidence that their sensitive data is protected, always available and driving operational excellence,” said Gerald Hofmann, VP of central EMEA, Veeam.