At Champions of Change, we believe technology isn’t just about infrastructure — it’s about enabling purpose. When Specsavers, a household name in eye care, set out to reimagine their data protection approach across over 400 ANZ locations, they weren’t just investing in backup solutions. They were safeguarding patient care, operational excellence, and the trust of millions.
That’s where we came in.
Behind the scenes at Specsavers: Capturing the essence of purpose-driven partnership. A candid moment during the filming of a Specsavers case study, highlighting collaboration, storytelling, and shared impact.
Photo: Supplied / Champions of Change
We’re proud to share our involvement behind the scenes in the recently published Veeam + Specsavers case study, which highlights how our team played a key role in transforming data protection for one of the region’s most recognisable healthcare retailers.
Solution Summary
In collaboration with Specsavers, we explored how Veeam’s innovative solutions transformed their data protection strategy, ensuring that their data is secure, available, and recoverable.
To meet Specsavers’ high availability and data protection requirements across hundreds of stores, a robust and geographically redundant backup architecture was implemented, leveraging Veeam and HPE technologies to deliver resilience, scalability, and rapid recovery while reducing operational burden.
At the store level, backups are taken locally at the virtual machine level, with the full system image stored on on-premise storage arrays. This ensures fast, local recovery from common issues like accidental deletion, corruption, or software failure, providing instant restore capability where it’s needed most.
To address historical infrastructure challenges, on-premise storage volumes, enhancing stability and easing management across store networks.
For regional protection, daily block-level backups are transmitted to a centralised HPE Apollo-based repository in Equinix’s data centre. A third copy is also stored in a Sydney-based data centre for geographic redundancy, supporting disaster recovery with confidence.
The infrastructure supports petabytes of data ensuring long-term scalability. Most notably, Specsavers has reduced its recovery time objectives (RTOs) from over a day to just one hour, supporting business continuity and real-time care delivery.
This solution also eliminated legacy tape backup processes, saving several hours a week per site in backup administration and enabling IT teams to focus on higher-value services.
To verify backup integrity, Veeam’s Backup feature restores and tests selected virtual machines in a sandboxed environment, proactively validating recoverability and reducing risk.
This partnership enables Specsavers to ensure the availability and security of critical patient data, allowing them to deliver seamless, high-quality optical and hearing care services to customers across Australia and New Zealand.
Together, the architecture reflects a future-ready approach to enterprise data protection, resilient, efficient, and designed for growth.
Resilience at Scale
Working alongside Veeam, we helped architect and deploy a solution that was robust, scalable, and future-ready. Specsavers needed assurance that their data protection strategy could keep pace with complex operations spanning over 400 retail stores, regional data centres, and hybrid cloud environments.
With patient data now scaling between 4 to 10 petabytes, Specsavers is managing one of the largest privately-held healthcare data pools in the region. This includes tens of millions of customer records, a scale comparable to national public health repositories, demanding enterprise-grade continuity and compliance.
People Who Made It Possible: Luke Kuret’s Impact, See and Hear It From the Specsavers
Projects of this scale and importance don’t succeed without people who lead with vision, precision, and commitment.
We’d like to give special recognition to Luke Kuret from the Specsavers team, whose diligence and technical insight were instrumental in aligning Veeam technologies with the organisation’s broader goals. Luke’s thoughtful approach to design and delivery ensured every layer of the solution, from local store operations to enterprise-wide resilience, met real-world needs without compromising on scalability or control.
His collaboration was a cornerstone of the project’s success and an embodiment of what strong vendor-client partnerships can achieve.
Luke Kuret shares his perspective on this transformation in the official case study published by Veeam. His statement captures not only the technical success of the deployment but also the strategic intent behind it, ensuring patient services remain uninterrupted and protected, no matter the scenario.
Future-Focused, Always
Our partnership with Specsavers exemplifies what we strive for in every engagement: empowering our clients with resilient, agile technology foundations. As data landscapes evolve, we’re committed to helping organisations not only keep pace — but lead with confidence.
We’re honoured to have contributed to this transformation and thank our partners at Veeam, and individuals like Luke Kuret and Sam Dutt, for their collaboration in delivering such a powerful outcome.
Sam Dutt, Senior Territory Sales Manager at Veeam (Left) Xara Tran, Founder and CEO Champions of Change (Right)
A testament to strategic alignment — where collaboration, capability, and purpose come together to deliver lasting impact.
Photo: Supplied / Champions of Change
Unified Through Partnership: Veeam’s Role in Strategic Alignment
A solution of this scale requires not only robust technology but also the right people behind it. The support and expertise from Sam Dutt and the team at Veeam were instrumental in helping align Specsavers’ long-term goals with a resilient, scalable backup and recovery strategy.
Throughout the engagement, Sam demonstrated a rare balance of calm professionalism and deep technical knowledge. His ability to navigate complex requirements while maintaining clarity and momentum played a key role in building trust across all stakeholders, Veeam, Specsavers, and our team at Champions of Change.
It was a pleasure working alongside Sam, whose approach helped foster a unified, collaborative environment that elevated the entire project. We look forward to continuing this partnership and building on the strong foundation we’ve created together.
Why It Was a Success
Champions of Change was more than a delivery partner, we were a trusted advisor who navigated the grey. Specsavers entrusted us not just with execution, but with strategic insight and risk stewardship.
Our role was pivotal in:
– Translating business continuity objectives into actionable technical solutions;
– Mediating between global vendors to ensure interoperability and alignment;
– Rapidly responding to in-field challenges with tailored design decisions;
– Leading from a place of purpose, always balancing efficiency, security, and client values.
This outcome wasn’t a product of chance, it was the result of disciplined collaboration, sharp strategy, and the belief that people come first in every technology journey.
Written by: Xara Tran
Founder & CEO, Champions of Change Pty Ltd
Date: 02/06/2025