Brunel International Chooses Veeam Availability Suite and Backup for Microsoft Office 365

Brunel International N.V., a global workforce solutions provider, has chosen Veeam Availability Suite and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 to support the company’s recruitment and staffing solutions.

Veeam helps Brunel protect critical data powering the solutions and provides complete control and protection of Office 365 data. It also facilitates compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and local data retention laws.

“Brunel serves the world market for professional staffing and recruitment,” said Marc Nonnekes, manager infra systems, Brunel. “Veeam helps us protect the data that is essential to meeting clients’ needs.“

Brunel’s operational excellence is the result of more than 45 years of business conducted globally. The company’s wealth of experience gives clients confidence their resourcing and employment requirements will be managed with the highest level of professionalism. Critical IT systems support client account management and recruitment, including Microsoft Dynamics for client relationships and Microsoft Office 365 for employee collaboration. Both systems help Brunel map out requirements for each client and create solutions to meet those requirements.

“Protecting the data in these systems is critical to meeting clients’ needs, so we faced a challenge when our legacy backup solution was no longer reliable,” Nonnekes said. “It was difficult to use, causing one headache after another.“

Brunel replaced the legacy solution with Veeam Availability Suite.

Nonnekes said the difference between the 2 solutions was significant: “Backups are reliable with Veeam, recovery takes minutes and it’s easy to use, which saves 10 to 15 hours each week in backup management time. We trust Veeam, so before we transitioned to Office 365 in the cloud, we asked Insight Enterprises, one of our strategic partners, what they thought of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365. They agreed Veeam was the best choice for us.“

Veeam backups 4.5TB of data (including 1,500 Office 365 mailboxes) on-premises and transfers backup copies to Azure for DR. If Brunel experiences a disaster situation, Veeam offers several fast recovery features.

Instant VM Recovery restores a whole VM in minutes and Veeam Explorers for SQL Server, Exchange and SharePoint restore individual items in Microsoft Dynamics and Office 365.

“Our biggest concern about moving to Office 365 was losing historical data,” Nonnekes said. “We have to be able to restore data from seven to 10 years in the past to remain compliant with GDPR and local data retention laws. Brunel operates in 40 countries, and data retention laws are wide ranging.“

In addition to helping Brunel quickly restore data within specific retention periods, Veeam protects vs. accidental deletion and security threats. With a few clicks, the IT team can restore Exchange items, SharePoint sites, OneDrive for Business accounts and Microsoft Teams data.

“We had grown familiar with the recovery features in Veeam Availability Suite, including single-item recovery, which wasn’t possible with legacy backup, so we are happy to use these features again in Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365,” Nonnekes said. “Recovering anything with Veeam is fast and easy.“

Case study: Veeam helps Brunel protect data powering global recruitment