California Dairies Chooses Veeam

Veeam Software, Inc. was selected by California Dairies, Inc. (CDI) to protect their Microsoft 365 data and mitigate cyberattacks.

It is also ensuring BC through verified DR strategies, fast-tracking data protection for multi-cloud ecosystems and offering additional ransomware resilience for the #1 dairy processing cooperative in California that produces safe, fresh milk for all 50 states and more than 50 countries.

CDI is the largest farmer-owned milk-processing cooperative in California, producing approximately 40% of the state’s milk and 20% of the nation’s butter. It is comprised of more than 300 dairy farms producing nearly 17 billion pounds of milk annually, which it processes to make butter, fluid milk products and milk powders. Its production of fresh, high-quality dairy products every day is key to its ongoing success, but this can be a challenge if there’s an unforeseen IT incident.

After facing a near-catastrophic failure where an on-premises Exchange server became unavailable, CDI was able to restore data using Veeam Backup & Replication. Following this incident, it recognized the benefits of migrating its on-premises environment to the cloud and decided to deploy Backup for Microsoft 365 for its ease of use, simplicity and reliability.

“Each dairy farm is integral to everything we do as an organization, so protecting the data that helps us collect, market and process milk while providing services to our members is critically important,” said Matthew Prieto, director of infrastructure and security, CDI. “From the first time we started using Veeam solutions, we have not been let down. We know our data is protected and always available when we need it. Veeam has been absolutely core to BC, so as we’re moving more backups to the cloud, we know we’re covered.“

Like many manufacturing companies, CDI was an early adopter of virtualization. After it determined that backing up physical servers to tape, wasn’t suitable for VMs, it chose Veeam Availability Suite. Veeam is cloud agnostic, offering flexible, native-cloud backup capabilities and solutions to defend vs. ransomware attacks and other threats.

Veeam backups 72TB of data across 240 VMs to ExaGrid Systems, Inc., which replicates to a DR site. CDI’s DR strategies include Veeam DataLabs to verify recovery of backups and replicas (SureBackup and SureReplica) and Instant VM Recovery to restore in minutes. In addition, it creates immutable backups in Amazon S3 storage for additional ransomware protection. It also backups and protects 14TB of data in Microsoft 365 (OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams and Exchange) directly to an off-site cloud repository, which replicates to a DR site for additional protection. It sends backup data to Azure Blob Storage and Amazon S3, allowing for protection, security and resiliency of data in long-term, low-cost object storage.

Case study: California Dairies, Inc. deploys Veeam to protect Microsoft 365 data and mitigate cyberattacks