Seven network staff reclaim time as operations go digital

Seven Network has saved its IT staff two hours following the digitisation of its data and workflow process across the organisation.

The network, which sees around 17 million consumers tune into the channel, upgraded its data protection across multiple cloud platforms via Veeam platforms.

Results seen from work so far include IT employees reclaiming two hours weekly on checking backups, freeing up more time for value-added work, simplifying the backup of 500 TB of data and now having a single point of control for protecting a hybrid multi-cloud environment.

Matthew Hankinson, infrastructure manager for IT at the Seven Network told Digital Nation the network now has better protection and restoration of services in the event of requests and also provides the IT team with real-time visibility into backup performance.

“Our immutable backups, combined with Veeam, provide our cyber security team with confidence that we have robust measures in place to safeguard against the increasing frequency of ransomware attacks in the industry.

“Additionally, the restore times are significantly faster with Veeam technology compared to the previous traditional backup solutions used by Seven Network.”

Hankinson said the next step for Seven Network is to continue leveraging Veeam’s solutions to protect more workloads and explore how Veeam can enhance our long-term disaster recovery and cloud backup strategies.

“Recently, we have focused on implementing offsite Object Storage backups for extended retention, thanks to the new functionality introduced by Veeam in version upgrades over the past 12-18 months,” he added.

Hankinson said the work commenced after determining the Seven “needed a sustainable and modern backup tool to protect its virtual workloads.”

“The network previously relied on a legacy and traditional backup system, but this method struggled to keep pace with the demands of a large media company that required constant, reliable access to data for making programming, advertising, and strategic decisions.

“The challenge was further amplified by the scale of operations, with 2,200 full-time staff and up to 700 casual contractors during peak times, all needing seamless data access across various platforms.”

Hankinson said the Veeam's universal licensing allowed the team “to protect all workloads moving forward, wherever the workload platform was, be it virtual, cloud, physical, or NAS.”

He added that the network had worked with the tech solution company before, “so when the initial team first started looking for a solution 7-8 years ago, they needed something modern that could also plug directly into the virtualisation platform.”

“Before adopting Veeam, Seven Network's reliance on tape backups made data protection error-prone.

“The process previously required someone local to manage tapes physically, which involved punching in tapes and ensuring they were collected and transferred to backup sites.

Hankinson explained this manual approach not only “consumed significant time but also posed risks in terms of data security and recovery reliability.”

Following Seven automation work, the need for manual tape handling dropped, “thereby significantly reducing the time and effort required to manage backups across all locations.”

“Previous backup solutions were not equipped to handle workloads being migrated into new environments efficiently.

“After implementing Veeam, we were able to execute full backups of our cloud environments, something that was difficult with previous tools. This improved our ability to recover data quickly and reduced the risk of data loss when expanding cloud infrastructure.”

He said there used to be a “long turnaround time” and the “lack of a single, cohesive solution made it difficult to ensure consistent and reliable backups, especially as the network expanded its use of cloud services”.

“This fragmented approach would have posed risks to data availability and could have led to longer recovery times in the event of data loss or corruption.”

The solution was initially placed into corporate IT “and implementation across our workloads was quick, allowing us to be across all our targeted workloads within a month”.

“Since then, we've expanded Veeam licensing to cover more workloads, and more recently, we introduced Office 365 Backups for the business,” Hankinson said.

Channel seven has also has opened its own ‘AI Factory’ in an effort to upskill its non-tech staff while also enabling its IT departments to develop AI-based pilots.