It’s every data center manager’s worst nightmare. Two active directory controllers broke over the weekend, and now the information technology department at the Baloise Group faced the uncomfortable prospect that if a third controller failed, 1,500 branch personnel would be unable to do their critical work for an entire day.

“This could have cost us half a million Euros, this outage, if it occurred,” said Markus Marksteiner (pictured), head of infrastructure and support and group chief technical officer at Baloise Group, an insurance company based in Switzerland.

Fortunately for Marksteiner, the story had a positive outcome. Alerted to the problem by Veeam ONE, a monitoring and capacity planning tool for the backup infrastructure, the IT staff at Baloise followed a precise set of recovery steps.

“We just rolled off these two active controllers with Veeam in a certain time period and nothing happened,” Marksteiner said.

He told his story during a visit to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and answered questions from co-hosts Dave Vellante, (@dvellante), and Stu Miniman, (@stu), during this year’s VeeamOn event in New Orleans, Louisiana. They discussed how Baloise has integrated Veeam into the company’s IT infrastructure, as well as the future of cloud services in the insurance industry. (* Disclosure below.)

Adopting the complete backup stack

Baloise maintains two data centers in Basel, Switzerland, and a third outside of the area as a backup site. Marksteiner originally turned to Veeam for help with data replication in the third site, which was also used by developers in a non-production environment.

“It’s not only about data replication with Veeam, it’s also about the complete backup stack,” Marksteiner said. “Now, we’re backing up almost everything with Veeam.”

Because the insurance industry operates in a highly regulated market, use of the public cloud is limited. Marksteiner, however, is seeing signs that his industry is moving toward a cloud services model. This means that he will be relying on Veeam and other vendors to provide cloud-compatible software as well.

“The insurance and financial sector in Switzerland is slightly opening up for cloud services. The cloud connection will be very important,” Marksteiner concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VeeamOn 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VeeamOn 2017. Neither Veeam Software Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE