How AI software firm One Data protected its Kubernetes environment with Kasten K10

One Data GmbH is a German software company and a specialist in the use of applied artificial intelligence (AI). With over 200 employees in Passau, Munich, Frankfurt and Berlin, One Data offers an AI-powered Data Product Builder for innovative and collaborative data teams, which enables organisations to realise the full potential of their data.

The problem:

One Data delivers advanced data insights for its customers through its AI-Powered Data Product Builder. As the company grew, new customers increasingly asked for a hosted option.

Additionally, One Data saw an opportunity to boost productivity by supporting its solution engineers more effectively.

Julian Breiteneicher, tech lead IT infrastructure 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 base configuration for demos and Proof of Value deployments, we could help them start projects more quickly.”

As One Data embarked on its journey towards becoming a product company, it wanted a reliable solution to protect customer data in production environments. It also wanted to ensure data availability for key collaboration applications such as Microsoft 365. At every step, the company looked to preserve 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 standardise on the best possible cloud-native tools that could support our business growth.”

One Data was an early adopter of Kubernetes as a futureproof way to run and scale its solutions. It started with test and development workloads, and rapidly added three different and independent backup toolsets for its six Kubernetes clusters. When the company decided to launch its hosted service on Kubernetes, selecting a single, powerful data protection solution became a priority.

“First, we decided to consolidate our clusters and standardise on SUSE Rancher,” says Breiteneicher. “Next, we looked for a data protection solution that could seamlessly integrate with Kubernetes, allowing us to use all the capabilities the container orchestration and management platform has to offer.”

The solution:

To ensure it could offer the same great level of customer service while adding hosting to its offering, One Data selected Veeam’s Kasten K10 to protect its Kubernetes environment.

The company was also impressed to find out that K10 offered native support for immutable backups, a key feature One Data needed to protect customer data against cyberattacks. “Security is a top priority for us,” says Schöpp. “With Kasten K10 we can protect our Kubernetes clusters easily and make sure that backups are consistent and cannot be deleted or tampered with.”

One Data takes advantage of the deep integration K10 offers with the entire Kubernetes stack.

Breiteneicher says: “With K10 we can fully automate the creation of backup policies and set up everything as part of our standardised deployment workflows. Now we no longer have to manually configure data backup tasks, automating this step has made our K10 deployments even more reliable.”

By leveraging Kyverno, an open-source policy engine designed for Kubernetes and integrated with Kasten K10, One Data validates backup configurations and enforces security best practices. The company has gained advanced Infrastructure as Code capabilities that provide security guardrails for mission-critical data analytics workloads.

“With Kasten K10, we can now ensure consistent backups based on snapshots,” notes Breiteneicher. “This approach is fast and efficient, so we can protect our containers without downtime and store our backups in a cloud-native, cost-efficient object store 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 emails and files daily to Microsoft Azure, ensuring business continuity for over 200 users.

With data protection it can rely on, One Data is free to focus on expanding its business. The company is winning additional market share and driving its productivity to new heights. It has also increased its cyber-resilience measures, helping to enable a high level of service continuity.

The result:

1. Helps win new business with 100% reliable, enterprise-grade container backups for the company’s recently launched hosted service.

“For backups of 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 Kasten K10.”

2. Boosts productivity for solution engineers by enabling them to move fast and reuse pre-configured demo configurations.

Relying on a fine-grained permission model and using intuitive self-service features, users can adjust backup policies including snapshot frequency and leverage saved application restore points for their own environments.

3. Increases protection against cyberattacks with an optimised security architecture that supports hardened Kubernetes clusters and also covers collaboration data.

“To increase our infrastructure security, we use a hardened Kubernetes configuration,” says Schöpp. “While some backup solutions require full privileges, K10 works perfectly with restricted access permissions. This facilitates security best practices and boosts the cyber-resiliency of our hosting operations.”

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