Written by Dewet Blaauw, Group Network and Security Manager at Unifrutti
As an industry worth more than R53 billion annually, South Africa’s fresh-produce sector faces constant pressure to keep produce in peak condition from farm to shelf. From harvesting and packaging to cold-chain shipping and final delivery, each step must be executed flawlessly to preserve quality and freshness.
At the centre of this delicate process lies data. Temperature readings, logistics updates, and compliance records all form part of a digital ecosystem where a single disruption could slow the flow of perishable goods and affect livelihoods throughout the supply chain. For Unifrutti, an international fruit and vegetable trading company founded in 1948 and operating farms and facilities across geographically dispersed regions, including remote agricultural areas in South Africa, access to accurate, always-on information is essential.
According to Dewet Blaauw (above), Group Network and Security Manager at Unifrutti, accurate data is critical, particularly given that at any moment, a power cut, connectivity drop, or hardware failure could jeopardise months of careful cultivation.
“Our six-year partnership with Veeam has been instrumental to our success, thanks to its usability,” says Blaauw. “Veeam’s data resiliency has allowed us to roll out immutable backups, recover virtual machines (VMs) instantly, and restore databases within production environments using very simple controls. Additionally, we estimate that Veeam offers 20% lower running costs compared to competing data resilience solutions.”
Unifrutti relies on a combination of on-premises and cloud-based backups depending on location. Using Veeam, the company’s central IT team can manage a global deployment through a single console, providing end-to-end insight and control of data resilience. To this end, the majority of offices are backed up to the cloud, while its rural farms are best suited to on-premises backups.
Moreover, Veeam’s licensing model, based on virtual machines (VMs), enables Unifrutti to deploy instances flexibly and easily, even at some of the most remote locations. In addition, the ability to host Veeam servers on Linux removes operating system license expenses in an increasingly cost-conscious industry.
“Across our farm locations, Veeam’s Remote Proxy Server allows for automated, hands-off data recovery – a solution that has proven invaluable on more than one occasion,” adds Blaauw. “If a system upgrade for our business-critical ERP system fails at one of our main offices, we can restore the instance within just eight minutes using Veeam, and often before users are aware that there is a problem. That makes data loss less likely than ever before and contributes to 99.995% data availability.”
Unifrutti is leveraging Veeam’s built-in malware scanning functionality to enhance its cyber-resiliency measures. For the company’s rural farm locations, this capability is paying dividends. Apart from equipping them with reliable, easy-to-recover backups, Veeam also provides the company with powerful integrated threat detection, ensuring that even the most remote locations have additional layers of protection against cybercrime.
By embedding advanced data resilience into its South African operations, Unifrutti has strengthened its ability to uphold freshness, compliance, and continuity across global markets. Whether maintaining temperature-sensitive produce or meeting export schedules, the company can operate with confidence that its systems, and its fruit, will remain protected from field to fork.
“Partnering with Veeam has allowed us to safeguard even our most remote farms without the need for complex infrastructure. After all, data is the invisible ingredient in every box of fruit we deliver, and with Veeam, that ingredient is always available,” concludes Blaauw.
Feature photo: Tom Fisk on Pexels
