Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 20 | Page 58

CASE STUDY which means it can integrate with numerous storage technologies, allowing greater flexibility and choice for customers. This ensures that integration into the IT systems and business operations of ContinuitySA customers happen as smoothly as possible. “Our clients have been very satisfied with Veeam’s hyper-availability offering; it has proven to be consistently effective in scheduled tests and real-world recoveries,” said van Rensburg. “From data corruptions, system failures, accidental deletions and malicious ransomware attacks – we have been consistently successful in recovering our clients when they have experienced outages.” According to van Rensburg, Veeam provides visibility of operations, quicker recovery times, multiple recovery points and better flexibility of protected solutions irrespective of the customer industry or company size. Without these elements, several of its customers would have had to close operations as they would have been unable to recover from the data loss experienced. “The positive impact extends to time-savings as well,” he said. “We have had a client migrate from a backup configuration that took longer than 12 hours to perform daily backups and 72 hours for weekly ones to a Veeam environment that reduced the time to less than 75 minutes and 10 hours respectively.” From a business perspective, ContinuitySA customers can deliver on their strategic mandates while Veeam manages their replication and data availability needs. Veeam is an enabler for effective business growth by allowing the internal resources of companies to be repurposed for innovative product development and services delivery. Veeam has also assisted ContinuitySA to reallocate customer resources using a dedicated team of professionals that provide deep and specialised recovery expertise to its clients. This has enabled ContinuitySA to expand on its value proposition and establish new lines of service. Ultimately, this is focused on delivering even more measurable business benefits to its customers that positively impact operations. “Furthermore, Veeam provides good value on its licensing price point that sees us making it available to our clients at market-related rates. However, the most important part of the technology has been its applicability and success to so many different environments across industry sectors,” said van Rensburg. This is especially important given how data compliance is evolving. The likes of the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) in South Africa and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union mean companies must be able to ensure that the safety of data takes strategic priority. “It is very difficult for one technology to cover everything from a data compliance perspective,” said van Rensburg. Veeam is enabling us to further assist our clients to become compliant and use the necessary features and audit processes to enable alignment to the regulatory [data] framework.” Additionally, ContinuitySA has recently started using Veeam Agents and its number of clients and protected servers are VEEAM PROVIDES GOOD VALUE ON ITS LICENSING PRICE POINT THAT SEES US MAKING IT AVAILABLE TO OUR CLIENTS AT MARKET-RELATED RATES. 58 INTELLIGENTCIO increasing continuously. “Modern business requires a new level of data uptime, which we refer to as ‘hyper-availability’,” said Kate Mollett, Regional Manager for Africa South at Veeam. “As data continues to sprawl and new compliance requirements add complexity, downtime and unplanned outages become even greater an issue for IT teams to manage. By giving an onsite IT team peace of mind around data protection and data management with the strength of our www.intelligentcio.com