Metrovacesa Eliminates Risk of Data Loss in its Cloud environment with Veeam and Ensures Sectorial Regulations Compliance

The Business Challenge 

Founded in 1918, Metrovacesa is a real estate developer and plays a leading role in the Spanish market. 

The sale of its entire portfolio of rental assets to Merlin Properties in 2016 meant, at the IT level, a full demerger and the implementation of a new infrastructure of systems, communications and also applications for the new business focused on residential development in Spain. 

The launch of this new business stage entailed the implementation of a new IT model based on a datacenter in a private Cloud with the Backoffice (SAP), connected to Front applications in a pay-per-use model in public Cloud, mainly Office 365 and its suite of office applications, mail, OneDrive, CRM, Power BI. 

Emails and attachments are the backbone of business communication and critical assets for all companies, especially for real estate developers. They are key components for compliance with the requirements of the 10-year insurance, to which the company is bound by law. This insurance guarantees customers that all material damages caused to the building by construction issues during the first 10 years will be compensated. 

“The agreement with Microsoft regarding the services offered in the cloud with Office 365 makes it clear that only you, the customer, will be responsible for the data. The backups offered by the vendor with Office 365 do not allow the granularity needed in the information retrieval. We needed more flexibility and security,” explains Mario Moreno Martínez, Systems and Communications Manager at Metrovacesa.

The Veeam Solution 

Metrovacesa chose Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, used as a service through SCC, a Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) partner. In the SCC cloud, Metrovacesa can protect critical data, not only the emails from Exchange, but also the data of the files that are transferred in OneDrive, Sharepoint and Teams. 

Compared to other solutions on the market, Veeam’s proposal brought the company three main advantages. First, the possibility to upload all the old Exchange 2010 emails to the cloud using PST files; second, the possibility to place all the assets in a manufacturer-independent cloud space, making it easy to migrate to another location at any time; and third, the possibility to benefit from national and friendly support services. 

With Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 managed as a service by SCC, Metrovacesa continues its commitment to outsource its IT infrastructure to the cloud. With this solution, its IT department can focus on innovative projects that bring value to the business by saving the time spent with recurring tasks.

Metrovacesa holds 225 protected mailboxes occupying 10TB in a SCC datacenter located in Madrid. Its security policy sets a weekly full backup and several incremental backups a day with a 7-year retention policy. This gives you a more secure environment than the retention offered by Microsoft since its maximum retention is 2 months in Office 365. “But there are more advantages. If you lose an email in Office 365, Microsoft does not restore the mail in a granular way, but the entire mailbox is restored, and the time consumed in executing this task is added. Moreover, there is a risk that you can delete the files or emails from previous days if you force the restoration. Imagine what the loss of sensitive or critical information attached to those emails or stored on OneDrive can mean for the company”, points out Moreno. 

In this scenario, Mario Moreno highlights the granularity of Veeam when performing the recovery: “Instead of navigating through the mailbox until you find the lost email or file, Veeam’s console allows you to easily get to it and restore it quickly. It’s very intuitive.”  

Its use is so straightforward that he can select the email in question and restore it himself without the help of SCC: “Although it’s a managed service, I don’t lose control of the solution,” he says. 

So far, they have not had to face any critical restoration, but they have performed tests in which they have set a recovery time objective (RTO) of one hour and a recovery point objective (RPO) of one day with the Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption (MTPD) of six hours. “High Availability of emails is always important in order to not to miss any opportunity,” says Moreno, who is satisfied with his current disaster recovery infrastructure. “With the daily backup through Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, we protect our environment to the maximum and we get fast recovery to meet our legal obligations. Veeam offers me extra security knowing that everything is properly backed up.”

Veeam has been paramount to the ongoing success of Metrovacesa. It helps protect against accidently deletions, assists with compliance and retention policies, helps mitigate internal and external threats, and supports compliance with regulations such as the 10-year insurance policy (Seguro Decenal), Internal control and risks management systems with regard to financial reporting (SCIIF) or the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). 

The usage of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 as a service in SCC is also highly valued by Metrovacesa: “In the cloud you always have the most innovative technology and the migration took only two weeks. After an initial cost for installation and configuration, we now only pay a monthly fee for license, number of Veeam users, storage volume and SCC management. Compared to an on-premise model, we save 60% of the time needed to deploy and manage such a solution, and 40% in both hardware/software acquisition and human resource costs.” 

The Results

60% time saving and 40% cost savings with Veeam
Through SCC, a Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) partner, Metrovacesa has access to Veeam technology without having to incur additional expenses to manage backups and restorations.

Highest protection and Availability of the entire Office 365 environment to assume legal liabilities
Emails and files are evidence always accessible to any process or audit linked to the 10-year insurance policy (Seguro Decenal) or other regulations like GDPR.

One-hour RTO and one day RPO with a six-hour MTPD
Now with Veeam it ensures consistent, fast recoveries with high granularity. With Office 365 it could only recover complete mailboxes, running the risk of deleting some emails.