The problem
A professional services firm runs its practice on a virtualised server estate that does the real work of the business: directory services, email, file servers, and a set of supporting systems. None of it is quick to rebuild if something goes wrong, and the firm cannot operate without it.
An estate like that needs three things working together. It needs backup that genuinely understands the platform it is protecting. It needs someone watching those backups every day, not just configuring them once and walking away. And it needs the endpoint layer — the laptops and desktops that all connect back to the servers — held to the same standard, because a compromised endpoint is the most common path to losing the very data the backups exist to protect.
Our approach
We took the whole picture off the firm's plate and put one team in charge of it. The firm's servers run on Proxmox, and we run Veeam Backup & Replication across that virtualisation estate, covering the directory, email, file and supporting servers the practice depends on day to day. Backups replicate offsite to a Veeam Cloud Connect destination we own and operate in our own Australian datacentres, with long-term copies held in cloud object storage for durability and retention — so the destination is a known quantity we run ourselves, not a black box.
The day-to-day work is the part most providers go quiet on. We watch the backups every day and fix issues before a recovery is ever needed — pruning checkpoint chains before they grow unwieldy, freeing repository space before a backup window runs tight, and clearing warnings before they turn into a failed backup. The point of watching a backup is to make sure it is there when it matters, so we treat that as ongoing work, not a one-time setup.
Across the firm's laptops and desktops, our remote monitoring and management platform runs as the always-on monitoring plane, with Microsoft Defender providing endpoint security. When a high-severity vulnerability with a known public exploit appears, we drive patching through the affected machines ourselves rather than waiting for users to update on their own schedule. Trickier authentication problems — password manager lockouts, Teams sign-in failures, Outlook on a phone failing after a passcode change — come back to our team, because we keep the on-prem email and directory expertise that hybrid environments still need.
The outcome
The firm has a backup posture that is actually managed — the software, the destination, and the people watching the destination all under one roof. The same team that runs the backups also runs the endpoint monitoring and the Microsoft 365 administration, so when an alert needs cross-referencing across layers, there is no handoff and no finger-pointing. Critical workloads stay protected, endpoint security stays current, and the firm gets to spend its time on its clients rather than on infrastructure plumbing.
This is what we mean when we say we run what we sell. We own the offsite destination. We run the monitoring plane. The backup software, the endpoint management, the Defender posture, and the email and directory knowledge all sit under one relationship, all reachable on one phone number.
Hybrid Microsoft 365 estate. The firm's email and identity run as a hybrid setup — on-prem identity and email interoperating with Microsoft 365 in the cloud — and our support disciplines are built for exactly that reality.
