Insight Global Deploys Veeam Availability Suite

Insight Global, LLC, a staffing and services company headquartered in Atlanta, GA has replaced its legacy backup solutions with Veeam Availability Suite to protect vs. ransomware attacks.

Whether it’s finding the right candidate for a job or managing a project end to end, Insight Global’s commitment to clients runs deep. The company’s recruiters and account managers cover all employment sectors and skillsets. It identifies talent, coordinate interviews and handle onboarding and payroll.

“In order to place people in jobs and pay them, our systems and data must be backed up and protected,” said Dave Hudson, CIO, Insight Global. “That’s a big responsibility, and we take it very seriously. We’re responsible for people being able to put food on their tables and pay their rent.“

Protecting systems and data is such a high priority that the end user created a full-time position focusing solely on backup and DR. Jordan Tazewell, DR engineer, works to maintain BC as ransomware attacks escalate and cybercriminals show no sign of letting up.

In an independent survey of 3,000 business and IT companies who were asked about their data protection strategies, 76% of them reported at least one ransomware attack in the previous year. Backup repositories were targeted in 94% of those attacks and 36% of their data was unrecoverable.

“Our business can’t run if data is unrecoverable, so we made some changes to our backup strategy,” Tazewell said. “The first thing we did was ensure that the backup solutions we considered offered fundamental features: immutability to protect vs. ransomware.“

Hudson said a ransomware attack could lead to unplanned downtime, which could be detrimental to the business.

“Downtime might delay a client’s start date for a new job, or it might delay their paycheck,” he explained. “We’re not willing to take that risk, so we upgraded the legacy solutions to Veeam. We know our backups are reliable, secure and that we can act quickly to recover them. Veeam has helped increase our confidence to sustain business operations.“

Veeam backups 100TB across 100 vSphere VMs from Pure Storage SafeMode snapshots on premises for immutability and sends backup copies to Wasabi cloud storage for additional immutability.

“Having immutable backups is critical in the fight vs. ransomware – and having the ability to recover from them quickly is also critical,” Tazewell said. “That’s what separates Veeam from competitors.“

Hel said one of his favorite Veeam features is SureBackup because it verifies the recoverability of each backup. Other favorites include Storage Level Corruption Guard, which scans backups to identify and repair corrupt data blocks, and Instant VM Recovery and Veeam Explorer for SQL Server, which recover data from Pure Storage snapshots.

“Recovery time has decreased significantly with Veeam because it integrates so well with Pure Storage,” Hudson said. “Veeam recovery has proven itself twice already: once during a system failure and a second time following user error. Each time we were able to get up and running in a very short time. Veeam is a dynamic enterprise solution for data protection.

“Our goal is absolute confidence that the business will be able to recover from a ransomware attack or a disaster scenario in as short a time as possible. Veeam helps us achieve our goal because it gives us the ability to be resilient and maintain BC.“

Case study: Veeam fights ransomware so Insight Global can fill 80,000 jobs annually