Baloise Group, in Insurance, Chooses Veeam

The Baloise Group, a provider of prevention, pension, assistance and insurance solutions in Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg, has entrusted Veeam Availability Suite to protect its brand and the company’s competitive edge.

Veeam delivers enterprise scalability that strengthens Baloise’s BC and DR strategy, supports the fight vs. ransomware, helps attract an additional 1 million customers and saves €1 million in IT costs over 5 years.

Baloise is not a traditional insurance company. Every business decision the company makes is based on society’s changing security, safety and service needs in the digital age. Its selling proposition is reflected in a simply safe strategy that combines forward-thinking products with customer-focused services; therefore, critical IT systems such as SAS data warehouse, SAS business intelligence and proprietary insurance and banking applications that support products and services must be available all the time.

Ensuring availability was a challenge with legacy backup solutions (IBM Tivoli System Manager and Microsoft Data Protection Manager) because they didn’t provide the enterprise scalability required to protect IT systems and fight ransomware, putting the Baloise brand and customer acquisition at risk.

“Enterprise scalability and ransomware protection are essential to our company’s success,” said Thomas Salvisberg, IT service continuity manager, Baloise. “We’re on course to attract an additional 1 million customers by 2021, and that wouldn’t have been possible with legacy backup.“

The user considered several replacement solutions including Commvault, NetBackup, vSphere Data Protection, VMware Site Recovery Manager and Veeam. “Veeam’s enterprise scalability keeps our IT systems available,” Salvisberg said. “We meet SLAs with our business units, they deliver innovative offerings to our customers and our company maintains a solid edge over competitors.“

He said Veeam helps ensure the company’s critical systems are available around the clock, enabling the IT infrastructure to remain agile and respond to market changes quickly-another competitive edge.

“By staying agile, we can create new solutions fast to meet the changing needs of customers. For example, when a customer app we created with the University of Luxembourg became extremely popular, we transformed it into a safe-driving program. We were able to do that because Veeam keeps our IT infrastructure agile and affords us time. We spend 50% less time on backup management because Veeam is so easy to use, saving 20 hours each week.“

Veeam backups 250TB across 2,000 VMs on-premises from NetApp storage snapshots and replicates off-premises for BCDR. It also sends backup copies to Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) for ransomware protection. Not only can the software company restore critical data from backup copies fast in an emergency situation, but it can also detect a ransomware attack in the initial stages by monitoring for abnormal activity. It analyzes CPU usage, datastore write rate and network transmit rate to identify higher than normal amounts of activity on a particular VM.

Veeam helps Baloise save money too: “It was more affordable than legacy backup, saving €1 million in IT costs over five years,” Salvisberg said. “We initially chose Veeam because it provides what legacy backup couldn’t-enterprise scalability to ensure our IT systems are always available. Saving money was a great bonus.“

Case study