One Data GmbH is a German software company specializing in applied artificial intelligence (AI). With over 200 employees across Passau, Munich, Frankfurt, and Berlin, One Data offers an AI-powered Data Product Builder that helps organizations unlock the full potential of their data through innovative and collaborative teams.

As the company grew, One Data received an increasing number of requests from customers for a hosted solution. Additionally, the company saw an opportunity to improve productivity by better supporting its solution engineers. These engineers spent a lot of time connecting to numerous data sources to generate insights for customers. By providing them with pre-configured base setups for demos and Proof of Value deployments, One Data could help them start projects more quickly.

As part of its shift towards becoming a product-focused company, One Data sought a reliable solution to protect customer data in production environments and ensure the availability of critical collaboration tools like Microsoft 365. Throughout this process, the company focused on maintaining its competitive edge by prioritizing speed over the competition.

One Data had adopted Kubernetes early on as a future-proof way to run and scale its solutions. Initially, it used Kubernetes for test and development workloads and later added three separate backup toolsets for its six Kubernetes clusters. When the company decided to launch its hosted service on Kubernetes, it became clear that finding a single, effective data protection solution was crucial.

To streamline its Kubernetes environment, One Data consolidated its clusters and standardized on SUSE Rancher. Next, it sought a data protection solution that would seamlessly integrate with Kubernetes, allowing the company to fully leverage the capabilities of the container orchestration and management platform.

One Data chose Veeam’s Kasten K10 to protect its Kubernetes environment. The company was impressed by Kasten K10’s native support for immutable backups, a feature essential for safeguarding customer data against cyberattacks. With Kasten K10, One Data could easily protect its Kubernetes clusters, ensuring backups remained consistent and tamper-proof.

One Data benefits from the deep integration that K10 offers with the Kubernetes stack. The company can fully automate backup policies and integrate them into standard deployment workflows. This automation has made K10 deployments more reliable and eliminated the need for manual configuration of backup tasks.

Additionally, by using Kyverno, an open-source policy engine for Kubernetes integrated with Kasten K10, One Data ensures that backup configurations meet security best practices. This provides advanced Infrastructure as Code capabilities, offering security guardrails for crucial data analytics workloads.

With Kasten K10, One Data can now ensure consistent, fast, and efficient backups based on snapshots, without downtime. It stores these backups in a cloud-native, cost-effective object store that it fully controls. The company also protects its central collaboration environment, including Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange, and OneDrive, using Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365. This ensures the business continuity of over 200 users, with several terabytes of emails and files backed up daily to Microsoft Azure.

With reliable data protection, One Data can focus on expanding its business, increasing market share, and driving productivity. The company has also improved its cyber-resilience measures, which helps maintain a high level of service continuity.

The result of these efforts includes:

• Winning new business by providing 100% reliable, enterprise-grade container backups for its hosted service.
• Boosting productivity for solution engineers by allowing them to reuse pre-configured demo setups, move quickly, and adjust backup policies as needed.
• Strengthening protection against cyberattacks with an optimized security architecture that supports hardened Kubernetes clusters and secures collaboration data.

By using a hardened Kubernetes configuration and relying on Kasten K10, One Data is able to follow security best practices and enhance the cyber-resilience of its hosting operations.