CASE STUDY
Today, some 14,000 staff work in 42
independent IKK companies, spread
over many divisions, branches and
outlets in more than 10 countries. The
group’s showrooms, sales offices, factories
and R&D offices can be found across the
MENA region.
Challenge
With lack of prompt support, rising errors
and system incidents, the IKK Group's legacy
backup solution presented a significant
business risk. The incumbent vendor’s
poor support framework translated to a
lengthy resolution process for the frequent
issues that the IKK Group's IT team
faced operating the legacy system. Being
responsible for the availability of data and
services to a huge number of remote and
local sites, the centralised IT team needed
a long-term technology partner that could
offer drastically better solutions and support
when needed.
Results
• Increased system engineers’ efficiency,
enabling them to focus on enhancements
and improvements (like security
hardening and storage utilisation)
• Introduced instant recovery (reduce
restore time from days to few hours in
some cases)
• Proved 30% more cost-effective than
legacy solution (at time of system switching)
The business challenge
The IKK Group operates a centralised IT
department that oversees technology
services for all IKK lines of business. One of
the key concerns of this central IT team is
to guarantee uptime of services for all users
and customers.
“If our data is compromised, or if our services
are unavailable, a tremendous number of
users and end customers are impacted,”
said Ayman Mansour, IT Infrastructure
Department Manager, IKK Group. “Service
downtime translates to a direct loss of
productivity and business.”
With so much at stake, Mansour and his
team knew that the IKK Group’s legacy
backup solution presented a significant
business risk. The solution would frequently
throw up errors during the backup process.
Due to the vendor’s lack of local support,
attempting to resolve these issues inevitably
translated to lengthy interactions and
follow-ups with channel partners, which
introduced complexity and waste of
valuable time. Given the group’s rapidly
scaling geographical footprint, 24/7 regional
support was no longer optional.
“Besides a solution that could meet
our technical requirements, we needed
better support and communications from
the vendor itself,” Mansour explained.
“Going through partners and facing long
delays was no longer viable for us. It was
time for a change.”
The Veeam solution
After careful market analysis, the IKK Group
selected Veeam Availability Suite to address
the technology and support shortcomings it
was facing.
An instant appeal in the evaluation process
was Veeam’s innovative licensing model.
“Instead of basing fees on terabytes, Veeam
pioneered the per-socket licensing model.
The per-socket costs only grow as your
environment grows, not as your storage
grows and so, we found this far more
cost-effective in the long run,” explained
Mansour. With the IKK Group’s environment
expanding as its business grows, Veeam’s
licensing model has proved to be 30% more
cost-effective than the previous solution.
Further resources savings have been made
possible by Veeam ONE, which provides the
centralised IT team with comprehensive
monitoring and analytics for its virtual and
physical environments. This has enabled
them to optimise resource planning and
maximise utilisations of existing investments
as they scale the IT infrastructure.
Highlighting the value of Veeam’s Instant
VM Recovery, Mansour described how this
feature ‘saved the day’ when his company’s
portal (Microsoft SharePoint) service, failed.
56 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com