Veeam Software announced it was selected by California Dairies, Inc. (CDI) to protect their Microsoft 365 data and mitigate cyberattacks. Veeam is also ensuring business continuity through verified disaster recovery (DR) strategies, fast-tracking data protection for multi-cloud ecosystems and offering additional ransomware resilience for the #1 dairy processing cooperative in California that produces safe, fresh milk for all 50 states and more than 50 countries.

CDI is the largest farmer-owned milk-processing cooperative in California, producing approximately 40% of the state’s milk and 20% of the nation’s butter. The company is comprised of more than 300 dairy farms producing nearly 17 billion pounds of milk annually, which CDI processes to make butter, fluid milk products and milk powders. CDI’s production of fresh, high-quality dairy products every day is key to its ongoing success, but this can be a challenge if there’s an unforeseen IT incident.

After facing a near-catastrophic failure where an on-premises Microsoft Exchange server became unavailable, CDI was able to restore data using Veeam Backup & Replication. Following this incident, CDI recognized the benefits of migrating its on-premises environment to the cloud and decided to deploy Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 for its ease of use, simplicity and reliability.

“Each dairy farm is integral to everything we do as an organization, so protecting the data that helps us collect, market and process milk while providing services to our members is critically important,” said Matthew Prieto, Director of Infrastructure and Security at CDI. “From the first time we started using Veeam solutions, we have not been let down. We know our data is protected and always available when we need it. Veeam has been absolutely core to business continuity, so as we’re moving more backups to the cloud, we know we’re covered.”

Like many manufacturing companies, CDI was an early adopter of virtualization. After CDI determined that backing up physical servers to tape, wasn’t suitable for virtual machines, CDI chose Veeam Availability Suite. Veeam is cloud agnostic, offering flexible, native-cloud backup capabilities and solutions to defend against ransomware attacks and other threats.

Veeam backs up 72TB of data across 240 virtual machines (VMs) to ExaGrid, which replicates to a DR site. CDI’s DR strategies include Veeam DataLabs to verify recovery of backups and replicas (SureBackup and SureReplica) and Instant VM Recovery to restore in minutes. In addition, Veeam creates immutable backups in Amazon S3 storage for additional ransomware protection. Veeam also backs up and protects 14TB of data in Microsoft 365 (OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams and Exchange) directly to an off-site cloud repository, which replicates to a DR site for additional protection. Veeam sends backup data to Microsoft Azure Blob Storage and Amazon S3, allowing for protection, security and resiliency of data in long-term, low-cost object storage.

Click here to read the complete California Dairies case study.