Canon Europe Chooses Veeam

Veeam Software, Inc. announced that Canon Europe Ltd chose its Availability Suite to protect critical business systems and data from ransomware attacks.

The vendor creates immutable backups that can’t be changed or deleted and provides staged and secure data recovery. It also supports compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and delivers Continuous Data Protection (CDP).

“We chose the industry leader that set the gold standard for data protection, but the biggest value-ad for us is assurance that we’ll always have access to our backups in a ransomware situation,” said Frank Buiskool, hosting and cloud operations manager, Canon Europe. “It’s not a matter of if your company will be attacked – it’s a matter of when.“

Ransomware is an ongoing threat for Fortune 500 companies like Canon. In 2020, 22% of the Fortune 500 were subjected to malware. Canon Europe contributes approximately a quarter of firm’s global revenues annually through sales and marketing operations in EMEA.

Veeam is deployed on Lenovo ThinkSystem SR630 servers in Canon Europe’s VMware software-defined data centers. It backups 150TB across 500 VMs and 100 physical machines on-premises to a VMware vSAN and off-premises to IBM flashSystem 5030. To make backups immutable, it uses object lock technology provided by S3-compatible storage providers to prohibit deletion of data. The end user airgaps these immutable backups on-premises for fast recovery.

Prior to recovery, Veeam DataLabs Staged Restore ensures sensitive data is removed from backups before they’re restored, which supports compliance with regulations like the GDPR. Next it scans backups to verify they are safe and free of malware. Veeam also identifies potential ransomware activity by tracking indirect signs of ransomware – typical activities and behavior that occur in a data center when malware is present. A good example is a machine with high resource usage. Veeam monitors, analyzes and reports on CPU usage, disk I/O and network activity.

“Another Veeam feature we like is CDP because it takes data protection one step further for our most critical workloads,” Buiskool said.

Veeam CDP saves a copy of every change made to data so files can be restored from any point in time, thus reducing recovery point objectives from minutes to seconds.

“Our Veeam experience has been very good, and that’s due in part to the people behind Veeam,” Buiskool said. “The knowledge level and proactive approach taken by our sales team are noteworthy, and that’s not something you see in a lot of vendors.“

Case study: Canon Europe zooms in on Veeam for ransomware protection