Grant Thornton consolidates 60TB of Microsoft 365 data into Veeam

Accountancy firm Grant Thornton Australia has consolidated 60 terabytes of backup and disaster recovery data into Veeam over the past 12 months.

Speaking at Gartner Symposium 2025 on the Gold Coast, Grant Thornton head of IT operations Mark Holmes said the company had onboarded to the vendor’s Data Cloud offering across its Microsoft stack and Salesforce CRM.

Holmes said the move was part of a broader strategy to strengthen data resiliency within the firm and for its clients, in response to escalating cyber threats.

“I joined Grant Thornton about 12 months ago, and one of the very early things we identified was how do we improve [our] data resiliency,” he said.

“We really set out to specifically [look at] ransomware protection. We wanted to improve upon, but we also wanted to minimise the overhead of the technical teams in managing our backup environment.”

Holmes leads a 20-person IT team that supports 1700 staff members and manages 3500 mailboxes.

The team initially deployed Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365, which Holmes said backed up around 60 terabytes of data within six months, a figure he expects to grow.

Following that, the team shifted focus to its Microsoft identity and access management (IAM) stack, Entra, backing up more than 15,000 identity objects.

The team also extended backup coverage to Grant Thornton’s Salesforce CRM platform.

Having addressed these core systems, Holmes turned his attention to how Grant Thornton’s backup and DR strategy can align with its broader IT roadmap - namely reducing its hardware footprint.

To support this, the company invested in Veeam’s Azure-based cloud storage solution, Data Cloud Vault, which sits above the vendor’s Backup & Replication deployment across a VMware environment of 70 virtual machines.

“One of the key things we wanted to do is avoid continuing investment in hardware and local storage options; we wanted to go straight to the cloud,” Holmes said.

“Cloud Vault really helps give us that strong ransomware protection that if we do find ourselves in a disaster scenario where someone has compromised our backups, we know we [will be] able to restore [those systems] as a last line of defence.”

Grant Thornton’s investment in backup also feeds into its future plans to adopt artificial intelligence technologies, particularly agentic AI.

Holmes said he is now focused on “ensuring our Microsoft 365 environment is clean and solid” in preparation for Grant Thornton’s next initiatives.