One Data GmbH is a German software company and specialist in the use of applied artificial intelligence (AI). With more than 200 employees in Passau, Munich, Frankfurt and Berlin, One Data offers an AI-based data product authoring tool for innovative and collaborative data teams, enabling organizations to harness the full potential of their data.
problem:
One Data provides its customers with advanced data insights through its AI-powered data product builder. As the company grew, new customers increasingly requested a hosted option.
In addition, One Data saw an opportunity to increase productivity by more effectively supporting its solution.
Julian Breiteneicher, IT Infrastructure Technical Lead at One Data, says, “Our solution engineers spend a lot of time connecting to dozens of unstructured and structured data sources to generate insights for customers. By providing them with a well-defined baseline configuration for demos and Proof of Value deployments, we could help them get projects up and running faster.”
When One Data set out on its journey to become a product company, it wanted a reliable solution to protect customer data in a production environment. It also wanted to ensure the availability of data for key collaboration applications such as Microsoft 365. At every turn, the company sought to maintain its competitive advantage: speed over the competition.
Florian Schöpp, Head of Customer Success, One Data GmbH, says: “To maintain our speed and agility, we needed to standardize the best possible cloud-native tools that could support our business growth.”
One Data was an early adopter of Kubernetes as a promising way to run and scale its solutions. It started with a test and development workload and quickly added three different and independent backup toolsets for its six Kubernetes clusters. When the company decided to run its hosted service on Kubernetes, choosing a single powerful data protection solution became a priority.
“We first decided to consolidate our clusters and standardize them on SUSE Rancher,” says Breiteneicher. “Furthermore, we were looking for a data protection solution that could seamlessly integrate with Kubernetes and allow us to take advantage of all the capabilities that the container orchestration and management platform has to offer.”
Solution:
In order to offer the same great level of customer service when adding hosting to its offering, One Data chose Veeam’s Kasten K10 to protect its Kubernetes environment.
The company was also impressed to find that the K10 offers native support for immutable backups, a key feature One Data needs to protect customer data from cyber attacks. “Safety is our top priority,” says Schöpp. “With Kasten K10, we can easily protect our Kubernetes clusters and ensure that backups are consistent and cannot be deleted or tampered with.”
One Data leverages the deep integration that K10 offers with the entire Kubernetes stack.
Breiteneicher says, “With K10, we can fully automate the creation of backup policies and set everything up as part of our standardized deployment workflows. Now we no longer have to manually configure data backup jobs, automating this step has made our K10 deployments even more reliable.”
Leveraging Kyverno, an open-source policy tool designed for Kubernetes and integrated with Kasten K10, One Data validates backup configurations and enforces security best practices. The company has acquired advanced Infrastructure as Code features that provide a safety guard for critical data analysis tasks.
“With the Kasten K10, we can now provide consistent snapshot-based backups,” notes Breiteneicher. “This approach is fast and efficient, so we can protect our containers without downtime and store our backups in cloud-based, cost-effective object storage that we fully control.”
One Data also protects its central collaboration environment, which includes Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange and OneDrive, with Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365. The company now backs up several terabytes of email and files to Microsoft Azure daily, ensuring business continuity for more than 200 users .
With data protection it can rely on, One Data can focus on growing its business. The company is gaining additional market share and pushing its productivity to new heights. It has also increased its cyber resilience measures, which helps enable a high level of service continuity.
result:
- Helps win new business with 100% reliable enterprise-grade container backup for the company’s recently launched hosted service.
“For backing up production workloads in our new offering, we wanted a stable, mature and proven solution that just works,” says Breiteneicher. “And that’s exactly what we got with the Kasten K10.
- Increases the productivity of solution engineers by allowing them to move quickly and reuse pre-configured demo configurations.
Relying on a granular permission model and using intuitive self-service features, users can customize backup policies including frame rate and leverage saved application restore points for their own environments.
- It increases protection against cyber attacks with an optimized security architecture that supports hardened Kubernetes clusters and also covers collaboration data.
“We use a hardened configuration of Kubernetes to increase the security of our infrastructure,” says Schöpp. “While some backup solutions require full permissions, the K10 works perfectly with limited access. This facilitates security best practices and increases the cyber resilience of our hosting operations.”
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