Admiral Insurances in UK Selects Veeam

Veeam Software, Inc. announced that Admiral Insurance Group plc, a car insurance company in the UK, has deployed its Availability Suite and Backup for Microsoft Office 365 to protect data supporting the customer experience and compliance with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

The vendor ensures reliable backup, recovers 90% faster and future-proofs data protection. Additionally, it enables immutability for ransomware resilience and saves in software, licensing and maintenance costs over 5 years.

“Veeam provides a range of capabilities and new innovations for data protection while also saving the business considerable money,” said David Loveless, infrastructure manager, Admiral.

Headquartered in Wales, Admiral, a Forbes Global 2000 and FTSE 100 company employs 11,000 people. It offers motor, household and travel insurance as well as lending products to millions of customers. From the start, the company has put customers first. By continually creating new products and services to meet their needs, it has amassed a diverse portfolio. Customers can go on line, use Admiral’s app and speak to a customer service representative. They can also peruse online guides to learn the most cost-effective ways to insure their cars, homes and travel. Filing a claim is easy too. Admiral’s aim is great service and value.

“Our top business priority is providing customers with the best experience, whether they interact with us online, through our app or on the phone,” Loveless said. “To do that, we must protect the data that drives the business.“

Admiral had been working with a MSP offering BaaS via IBM Spectrum Protect, but the IT team felt a more robust solution would be better for the business. Their immediate goal was faster, future-proof backup and recovery combined with visibility into the backup infrastructure so they could resolve issues proactively. They felt that level of functionality was the best way to protect data not only supporting the customer experience but also FCA compliance.

“It was time to bring backup on-premises,” Loveless said. “We also wanted workload portability for cloud integration and backup immutability for ransomware protection. We considered Symantec NetBackup because some of us had used it before, but we had also used Veeam, and we knew Veeam would fit the bill.“

Veeam backups 500TB across more than 400 VMs to Pure Storage FllashBlade on-premises. As the backup repository, FlashBlade hardens Veeam backups via SafeMode snapshots, making them impervious to ransomware. SafeMode snapshots can’t be deleted, modified or encrypted.

“Veeam also provides visibility by monitoring backup jobs and reporting if they’ve changed,” Loveless said. “And Veeam reports on our recovery history, which is useful during FCA audits. Recovery is easy and fast.“

Veeam also backups 60TB of Office 365 data including mailboxes, files and documents used by more than 8,000 employees to Azure Blob Storage. The product is scalable, enabling enterprises to protect petabytes of data and browse more than 100,000 objects simultaneously for recovery. Granular recovery capabilities such as Veeam Explorers for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams restore items quickly to support employees’ work and FCA compliance.

“Microsoft makes it clear that organizations are responsible for backing up their data, so Veeam was the clear choice for us,” Loveless said. “Many of our departments use Teams as a repository for documents, so if our colleagues were to delete a channel accidentally, they might lose their documents if we weren’t using Veeam. We know their work is backed up, and we know we can restore it quickly.“

Loveless said Veeam helps prepare the business for the future too: “One of our long-term goals is to continue moving workloads to the cloud, so we’re talking to Veeam about cloud-native backup options.“

Admiral is considering sending backup copies of Office 365 data to long-term, low-cost object storage. Veeam offers integrations with several, including Azure Archive, Amazon S3 Glacier and Glacier Deep Archive.

“Veeam gives the business a level of comfort that wasn’t possible with the MSP and the previous backup solution – and we’re saving considerable money,” Loveless said.

Case study: Admiral salutes Veeam for protecting data supporting their customers’ experience