German football club Schalke 04 boots Veeam, prevents data loss with backupheld and Acronis

Schalke 04, based in Gelsenkirchen, is the second-largest spots club in Germany and fourth-largest in the world by membership with more than 180,000 paid members. Primarily known as a football club, Schalke also operates basketball, handball and table tennis teams, among other sports. As the club’s name suggests, Schalke was founded in 1904.

backupheld is a managed service provider (MSP) based a short drive away from Gelsenkirchen in Witten, Germany. Founder Nils Kathagen and his team specialize in providing backup, IT security and Microsoft 365 services.

Schalke was using Veeam for data storage along with Microsoft 365’s native backup capabilities but found that combination to come up short of meeting the club’s needs. The club had no cloud backup and no backup for its Microsoft 365 service. It only had a local, on-premises backup solution. In some situations, data storage only lasted 30 days.

“It wasn’t enough,” says Niklas Curakovic, head of IT for Schalke 04. “We had some data lost in OneDrive. We needed another solution.”

The club also had to rethink its strategy for data storage. Data loss with employee offboarding was a problem because employees were storing data on their local machines rather than on the club’s network. When the club wiped employees’ devices upon their exit, the data disappeared permanently. Schalke’s IT department finally decided to strengthen data backup.

Schalke turned to Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud administered by backupheld in November 2024. The partnership was especially rewarding for Kathagen.

“Schalke is my favorite club,” Nils Kathagen says. “My granddad, my dad — everybody is a Schalke fan.”

backupheld started by backing up Microsoft 365 data for Schalke, a process that was so smooth that the MSP and the club quickly expanded their partnership.

“We showed the technicians from Schalke how Acronis Microsoft 365 backup works,” Nils Kathagen says. “It was really fast and easy.”

Schalke’s nine-person IT team ultimately decided to back up all of the club’s data in Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud. Backed-up data includes film, charts, player data and critical business information. And it’s not just football data. Schalke backs up data for its entire sports organization with backupheld in Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud. backupheld now serves Schalke by backing up 155 virtual machines, 528 Microsoft 365 users seats, three workstations and two servers, totaling almost 78TB of storage.

Data loss is no longer an issue for Schalke. Employee offboarding no longer leads to data loss thanks to Acronis backup and new IT policies for data storage. Time saving has been another benefit, with the small IT staff able to focus on tasks other than backup. The club only dedicates three employees to managing data.

“We have a better solution for data security and for backup,” Niklas Curakovic says. “We don’t have to check it daily, and we’ve had no issues with losing data.”

Kathagen’s team at backupheld can easily administer backup in a single interface through Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud. Schalke and backupheld are discussing ways to expand their partnership, looking into opportunities around disaster recovery.

“backupheld is a good partner with a lot of experience,” Niklas Curakovic says. “The communication is great.”