In today's digital world, it has never been more important to keep information stored in the cloud safe and readily available to the public at all times. To that end, many business managers are turning to online backup providers, such as Veeam, to help them protect their client data and ensure it's accessible at all times.

Asda, the third largest retailer in the world, has chosen Veeam Backup & ReplicationTM as its preferred solution for data backup. Asda is a leading UK grocery and general merchandise retailer with approximately £34 billion in revenue. In its quest to safeguard important computer systems, Asda has opted to purchase Veeam Availability Suite.

Since Walmart sold it to Bain Capital in early 2021, the supermarket chain has had to deal with the difficulty of taking responsibility for protecting the large, virtualized infrastructure that runs its business without breaking its limited headcount of IT workers, so Veeam's backups, recovery, and data management have given them the confidence to do so.

“Veeam's solution will allow us to protect our entire infrastructure from any disaster,” said Neil Finch, IT Director at Asda. “It's important for us that we have a partner who can ensure our data is safe. With Veeam Backup & Replication, we're confident that our data would be safe even if an outage or disaster occurred."

"That's what it's all about - protecting your customers' trust in you. The most successful brands always listen to customer feedback and adapt their strategy to match. We work closely with partners like Veeam to provide flexible, reliable backup solutions for today's complex infrastructures." Neil added.

From point-of-sale and scan-as-you-shop devices in its stores to e-commerce and inventory management systems for its online offering and home delivery, Asda heavily relies on digital services. Even little downtime could result in millions of pounds in lost sales in a business with such high volumes and low margins.

With Veeam Backup & Replication's automated remote system protection and centralized visibility in Veeam ONE, Veeam Availability Suite is giving the company complete visibility and control of their systems and the future option of Modern Data Protection in the cloud.

According to Veeam's VP for the UK and Ireland, Dan Middleton, "The scale of Asda's operation means that even a short period of downtime or small volume of lost data could be devastating to its bottom line.

"To protect against cyberthreats such as ransomware, which impacted 76% of UKI businesses over the past year, it's encouraging that Asda is using Veeam to create immutable backups, which prevent attackers from encrypting data after it has been written, and to identify failed or corrupted backups immediately."

Additionally, Asda has introduced self-service workflows to allow individual files to be restored by customers themselves. This accomplishment exceeds 70% of European businesses that have yet to incorporate self-service functionality into their business continuity and disaster recovery processes.

According to the Senior Server Engineer at Asda, "Being able to see all our backups through a single pane of glass with Veeam is a big advantage.”

"We can now configure, run and monitor backup jobs automatically, increasing data protection for Asda NewCo while keeping the IT team lean. Crucially, Veeam's support for self-service restores could cut IT support requests by more than half.

In the company's primary and secondary data centers, as well as its head office and one of its depots, Veeam backups and replicates data. Veeam continues to be deployed across Asda's business as the company remains confident that its solution is scalable and flexible enough to support its long-term strategy.

Cox added: "For tier-one systems, our Recovery Point Objective [RPO] is under 24 hours, and our Recovery Time Objective [RTO] is under 30 minutes. With Veeam, we can hit those objectives with ease. We recently tested our recovery capabilities, and it took us only 16 minutes to switch over to our secondary site with zero data loss.

"We can also put robust data restore capabilities in our employees' hands, which could help us cut IT helpdesk request volumes by over 50% and keep our IT headcount lean. Without a doubt, Veeam will make it easy to scale our backup environment as our data volumes grow."

Also, Read Nearly 50% of Businesses Struggle to Control Cloud Costs.