For Centrogest, a company with more than thirty years of experience in Facility Management, business continuity is a practical operational requirement. The integrated management of facilities, buildings and services depends on business applications and data remaining available and protected, even in the event of hardware failures or cyber incidents.
This requirement led to the project developed with AXOL Server. Rather than simply replacing the existing hardware, the aim was to introduce a new infrastructure strategy combining virtualization, high availability and stronger protection for backup copies.
An infrastructure designed to keep operations running
The first objective was to reduce the risk of a single component failure disrupting the company’s IT operations.
AXOL Server therefore designed a new infrastructure based on Proxmox VE, sized to meet Centrogest’s current requirements while allowing for future growth. The cluster architecture distributes resources across multiple nodes and provides a centralized environment for managing virtualized services, while retaining the ability to respond effectively if one of the nodes fails.
Proxmox was selected not simply as a hypervisor, but as the foundation of a more flexible, manageable and scalable infrastructure.
High availability and backups address different risks
Keeping services running is only one aspect of IT resilience. A high-availability cluster helps virtual machines remain operational when a hardware problem occurs. On its own, however, it does not protect against accidental deletion, application errors, data corruption or ransomware attacks.
For this reason, the new Proxmox infrastructure was complemented by a separate backup strategy. Backup copies make it possible to recover systems and data, while immutability adds an additional layer of protection by preventing backups from being altered or deleted throughout the defined retention period.
Centrogest can rely on two complementary levels of protection:
- business continuity through the high-availability Proxmox infrastructure;
- data recovery through protected, immutable backups.
Safeguarding the last route to recovery
More advanced ransomware attacks do not target production systems alone. Before encrypting business data, attackers often attempt to locate and delete the backup copies needed for recovery.
To mitigate this risk, AXOL Server integrates an immutable object storage layer into its Proxmox architectures. Technologies such as Object Lock, retention policies and WORM policies protect backup copies against unauthorized deletion or alteration, ensuring that they remain available even if the primary environment is compromised.
In this way, backups are no longer treated as simple copies of data. They become an integral part of the organization’s cyber resilience strategy.
A unified project, from infrastructure to data protection
One of the defining aspects of the Centrogest project is the integration between the different layers of the architecture. Virtualization, hardware, high availability and backup were not approached as separate elements, but as parts of a single, coordinated system. This reduces technical fragmentation and gives Centrogest a single point of contact for infrastructure design, configuration and support.
The result is an infrastructure designed not only to perform reliably under normal operating conditions, but also to respond effectively to unexpected events, from the failure of an individual component to the need to recover protected business data.
