Australian retail property group, Vicinity Centres, known for destinations such as Chadstone in Melbourne and the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney, has turned to Veeam for its data protection needs.
Vicinity’s IT platform team plays a critical role in supporting the company’s strategic goals, including the evolution of its retail destinations into mixed-use precincts that combine retail, workspace, and entertainment offerings.
To meet these growing demands, the team transitioned to a hybrid multi-cloud IT environment, integrating AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft 365 into its infrastructure. However, maintaining high data availability and a strong data retention strategy across this environment became increasingly complex.
Vicinity Centres platform team manager, Ljuba Butcher said, “It’s important that we can respond quickly to requests from the business to recover data if needed. We’re also subject to regulations that require us to demonstrate that we have a robust data retention strategy in place.
“When we began adding cloud workloads, we started looking for a data protection solution that was suited to a hybrid multi-cloud environment and gave us data freedom. Since we have a relatively small platform team serving over 1,000 users, it had to be easy to use and integrate with other technologies.”
Having trusted the platform for over 12 years, Vicinity selected Veeam to protect data across its IT environment, on-premises, AWS, and Azure environments, as well as safeguard 100TB of critical Microsoft 365 data. This has significantly reduced data protection management time, ensuring 24/7 availability while enhancing operational efficiency.
“Our journey with Veeam started over a decade ago, and along the way Veeam has grown and evolved alongside Vicinity’s requirements,” Butcher said.
“In the past we had multiple platforms for data protection including Commvault and IBM Spectrum Protect alongside Veeam. We started by backing up VMs in our data centers with Veeam, progressed to using Veeam replication for our disaster recovery, and we are now consolidating on Veeam as our data protection platform of choice because it offers ease-of-use, high-quality support and flexibility.”
With Veeam’s intuitive interface and seamless cloud integration, Vicinity’s IT team has cut management time by over 10 hours per week, allowing more resources to focus on strategic initiatives.
“On a bad day, it used to take multiple employees two to three hours per day to babysit the many backup products we had installed. Now that we’ve consolidated onto Veeam, we’ve cut that management time to an hour or less per day for one staff member, which is a dramatic difference,” Butcher said.