Yellow construction cranes by a building under construction.

IKK Group cuts backup time by 25% with Veeam and Microsoft 365

Microsoft partner Veeam delivers resilient, cloud-native backup for IKK Group’s Microsoft 365 environment, ensuring secure, efficient data protection for thousands of employees.

July 11, 2025

In the construction industry, resilience and efficiency are critical. For IKK Group—one of the largest building materials suppliers and manufacturers in Saudi Arabia and the MENA region, with specialized contracting services and various trading businesses—protecting Microsoft 365 data across 50+ sites and more than 5,500 employees required a modern approach. The company turned to Veeam, a trusted Microsoft partner, to implement a secure, automated, and scalable backup solution.

Veeam delivers data protection and backup solutions built for hybrid, on-premises, and cloud environments—including Microsoft 365 and physical and virtual infrastructure. Its platform simplifies data management while enabling fast recovery, cost efficiency, and strong compliance support.

“IKK needed a solution that could scale effortlessly and protect Microsoft 365 across a decentralized workforce,” said Dan Jones, Vice President of Sales for Veeam Data Cloud at Veeam. “With our deep integrations into their Microsoft ecosystem, they now benefit from centralized visibility, simple management, and the flexibility of scalable cloud protection.”

The overwhelming challenges of manual backups

Before partnering with Veeam, IKK Group’s IT environment faced mounting pressures. Manual backup processes were inefficient and time-intensive, consuming valuable IT resources, and slowing down operations. Without a centralized system, the team lacked clear visibility into backup status across its 50+ geographically distributed sites, making data protection difficult to monitor and manage.

The company’s rapid data growth—from 40 TB to over 120 TB in five years—highlighted the need for a scalable, future-ready solution. At the same time, inadequate cybersecurity protections left IKK vulnerable to ransomware threats, with no immutable backups in place. Integration gaps with Microsoft 365 added to administrative complexity, leading to inconsistent data protection across key collaboration tools like Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive.

Perhaps most pressing, the company faced significant business risk: "Unplanned downtime to our IT systems could cost the business the equivalent of almost five million dollars a day in a worst-case scenario," said Ayman Mansour, IT Infrastructure Department Manager at IKK Group. "Protecting our data and ensuring continuous operations isn’t just a priority—it’s a necessity."

Person in a warehouse looking at a tablet.

"Protecting our data and ensuring continuous operations isn’t just a priority—it’s a necessity."

––Ayman Mansour, IT Infrastructure Department Manager, IKK Group

Data protection at scale

IKK Group depends on Microsoft 365 for seamless collaboration across its geographically distributed teams. Thanks to Microsoft 365’s adaptable architecture and rich integration capabilities, the platform allowed IKK to enhance its data protection strategy by layering in enterprise-grade backup solutions without disrupting workflows.

By adopting Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365, IKK Group avoided costly delays, reducing manual backup time by 25% and recovery time objective for Microsoft 365 data by 20%. The shift from manually configuring Azure backup policies to using the integrated Veeam solution brought significant operational efficiency, streamlining processes and freeing up IT resources.

The platform protects Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business data for all employees, while integrating seamlessly with other Veeam solutions to support additional infrastructure needs. This includes immutable storage, which plays a critical role in ransomware defense. By preventing the alteration, deletion, or encryption of backups—even by malicious actors—immutable storage ensures that clean, restorable copies of data are always preserved. This layer of protection is essential to maintaining data integrity during attacks. Additionally, centralized management enables full visibility and compliance across all workloads, streamlining oversight as IKK scales its infrastructure and security posture. These efficiencies are further enabled by Microsoft 365’s API-rich environment and scalable infrastructure, which simplify integration and cost optimization.

As IKK Group's data volume continues to increase, Microsoft 365 is empowering the company to absorb that expansion without compromising performance, providing a stable foundation for secure collaboration and data protection.

“With our deep integrations into [IKK Group’s] Microsoft ecosystem, they now benefit from centralized visibility, simple management, and the flexibility of scalable cloud protection.”

–– Dan Jones, Vice President of Sales for Veeam Data Cloud, Veeam

Recovery and resilience, simplified

With the partnership between Microsoft and Veeam, IKK Group is equipped to meet growing cybersecurity demands and ensure resilient operations across its complex, multi-site environment—all while reinvesting the time they’ve saved. “We can now … focus on other important tasks such as capacity planning and exploring security-hardening features,” said Mansour.

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