Yamaha drives digital transformation with Veeam

The Business Challenges

For more than 50 years, Yamaha Brazil has provided motorized vehicles and products to enrich people’s lives. To improve the customer experience, the company envisioned a digital ecosystem to support customers and dealerships. Customers would gain a better digital buying experience and dealerships would benefit from a seamless backend that sustains operations and inventory.

Before Yamaha Brazil began its digital transformation, the company had to be certain the IT infrastructure was agile, transparent and secure.

“We evaluated our infrastructure to analyze the resiliency of data and discovered several shortcomings in our legacy backup solutions,” said Fernando Rostock, IT Executive Manager at Yamaha Brazil. “They didn’t offer the latest data protection capabilities, yet they had a high total cost of ownership. They also didn’t offer native encryption, and backup was slow and complex.”

Yamaha Brazil considered several solutions to improve data protection, so the IT Department studied assessments made by leading research and advisory institutions such as Gartner®. The IT Department also talked to peers in the industry and sought advice from several consulting companies including V8 Consulting, which helped develop and implement the project.

“V8 Consulting played an important role” Rostock said. “They understood our goals, were attentive to our needs, managed all of the prospecting and conducted the testing.”

V8 Consulting also helped define criteria for data protection: built-in disaster recovery (DR) for a hybrid-cloud environment, API integration for uncovering key customer insights for digital marketing as well as support for regulatory compliance. The new solution also had to meet current and future computing demands.

“The choice for data protection was clear,” Rostock said. “Veeam Availability Suite has all the features we need. No other solution offers the comprehensive capabilities or the level of maturity and innovation required by our company.”

The Veeam Solution

Veeam provides Yamaha Brazil with unmatched modern data protection and built-in DR for its hybrid-cloud infrastructure. Veeam also helps improve the customer experience through API integration that reuses backup data to uncover key customer insights for digital marketing. Furthermore, Veeam supports regulatory compliance for Brazil’s law regarding General Data Protection (LGPD).

“Veeam enables us take advantage of all the opportunities that digitalization offers,” Rostock said.

Veeam backs up 50 TBs of monthly data across 350 physical and virtual machines (VMs) and cloud for fast, local recovery.

“It didn’t take long to see the benefits Veeam provides,” said Manoel Júnior, Infrastructure Supervisor at Yamaha Brazil. “Our backup window decreased by 15 hours, enabling us to redirect tasks among employees to more strategic activities that will benefit the business. Recovery time decreased too. Veeam offers multiple restore options including granular recovery and Instant VM Recovery. We can recover data in minutes.”

Veeam also offers a Data Integration API that leverages backup data. Yamaha Brazil generates substantial data, and that data offers opportunities for analytics that can help improve the customer experience. Insights gathered from analytics help companies refine their digital marketing campaigns. In addition to leveraging data, Veeam offers data management through advanced monitoring, reporting and capacity planning.

“Veeam allows for more centralized management on-premises and offpremises,” Júnior continued. “For example, comprehensive reporting supports our compliance with LGPD.”

Rostock said Veeam encryption supports compliance as well.

“Veeam has definitely raised the bar on security for our company,” Rostock said “Next we’re considering immutability to enhance ransomware protection. Veeam creates a copy of backups that can’t be updated or deleted, enabling us to increase the protection we already have in place. Veeam is a solution that is always evolving to meet future needs.”

The Results

• Provides unmatched data protection and DR for the hybrid-cloud IT infrastructure
  “Before we began our digital transformation, we chose Veeam to support new business demands related to hybrid-cloud computing, privacy and security,” Rostock said. “Veeam is very important to us, and we appreciate that it’s always evolving.”
• Improves the customer experience by uncovering key metrics via API integration
  Veeam unleashes the power of backup data through API integration that offers opportunities for data mining, analytics and forensics. Veeam helps companies gain deeper insights into their data so they can increase customer satisfaction.
• Supports regulatory compliance for Brazil’s General Data Protection law
  In addition to supporting compliance for data privacy, Veeam offers immutable backups that can’t be updated or deleted. Veeam uses object lock technology provided by S3-compatible providers to prohibit data changes in backups (until the immutability expiration date).