Kerry Properties replaces Veeam and Veritas to protect extensive property portfolio data

Kerry Properties boasts an enviable portfolio of prestigious properties in APAC including the Kerry Centre, residences, hotels, and Megabox, a 1.1 million square foot shopping, dining, and entertainment complex in Hong Kong. Max Yip, head of infrastructure, security and operations at Kerry Properties, said, “We are on a digital transformation journey. We have been operating on-premises workloads at our data centers in Hong Kong and Shanghai, where we have about 500 VMware virtual machines (VMs) running business-critical applications. We also have local data on Windows and Linux servers hosted at about 20 remote and branch office (ROBO) locations.”

Kerry Properties’ digital transformation journey includes moving workloads to a multi-cloud environment, centralizing IT, including backups, and moving backups off-site. Across its locations, Kerry Properties used a variety of legacy backup methods, ranging from tape, to on-premises solutions like Veeam and Veritas NetBackup and Backup Exec, making backups inconsistent.

Not only was it operationally challenging to manage multiple backup tools, but there was no centralized visibility into whether the data was backed up properly. This left the company vulnerable to accidental data loss and ransomware. Additionally, the company’s user data was only backed up to a local Windows server. To align with its digital transformation goals, the company needed a cloud-based unified backup strategy.

Kerry Properties was already using Veeam to backup data from its MegaBox project, but Veeam didn’t support the company’s cloud-first strategy. “Veeam required so much underlying infrastructure to facilitate backups,” Max said. “And since we were looking to drive huge changes internally within a short timeframe, we needed a solution that we could get up and running quickly.”

Max was familiar with the Druva Cloud Platform from his time at a previous company, so the team ran a proof of concept (POC) for workloads in Hong Kong and Shanghai. They were particularly interested to see if Druva could handle difficult cross-border internet connection issues.

“Druva’s performance during the POC was strong despite our limited bandwidth. Data integrity is very important, so we ran a number of tests on data restoration to make sure it worked as expected,” Max said. After seeing how well it worked for backing up both VMware and Microsoft 365 data, Max chose Druva to be a partner in its fast-moving digital transformation.

“We wanted something we could turn on and start using instantly,” Max said. “That was absolutely Druva. And since it was so simple to use, we knew people would adopt it quickly.”

For Kerry Properties, Druva has been a key enabler of its digital transformation journey. In just a few months it replaced Veeam at the Megabox property and Veritas NetBackup at the Hong Kong data center, with plans to replace legacy solutions at the Shanghai data center. Druva also protects Microsoft 365 data (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and Teams) for Kerry Properties’ 800 users, and Max plans to begin backing up data from its ROBO locations soon.

Max said it is a relief to have a unified backup strategy that facilitates business continuity (BC). “For the first time, thanks to Druva, we know exactly what is backed up because of the platform’s centralized visibility. And we know the backups are stored in the cloud and isolated in case anything goes wrong. That’s priceless.”

“Druva facilitates our business continuity strategy and provides the ransomware protection we needed, but didn’t have in place before,” said Max.

Kerry Properties is achieving 2.33x global deduplication storage savings, which was impossible previously with its disparate, on-premises backup strategy. In addition, Max is able to free up IT resources for other strategic projects.

Using Druva will also save Kerry Properties up to US$3 million in physical infrastructure costs within the next five years. “Druva will help us avoid spending huge sums on on-premises backup infrastructure,” Max said. “Not to mention the administrative costs of maintaining several different backup systems across the company.”