Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 68 | Page 51

CASE STUDY

BidAir Cargo , a wholly owned subsidiary of the BidVest Group Limited , offers an express cargo airline service from airport to airport to 37 destinations in Southern and Eastern Africa . When the company split off from BidAir Services , which was sold out of the Group in 2020 , all BidAir Cargo ’ s co-hosted servers needed to be redeployed and network infrastructure had to be reconfigured . The outdated backup system that was in place also needed to be replaced , and the company turned to Data Management Professionals South Africa ( DMP SA ), which recently joined forces with Gabsten Technologies , to deliver a modern , automated and more effective solution .

Learning from past mistakes
“ The backup system we inherited backed up our physical server on site to a NAS device , and from there the backup was manually replicated on to hard drives that were then placed into rugged cases and physically shipped off to Metrofile on a daily basis . It was incredibly labour intensive , requiring a significant amount of human intervention , which always creates the potential for error ,” said Hans Goosen , IT Manager , BidAir Cargo .
“ In addition , prior to the split , we had been victims of a ransomware attack that had encrypted all our data , which then required us to completely rebuild our servers and redeploy from backups . We had to format the servers , reload the operating system and software , physically obtain the backups from storage , and then manually restore the data . The entire process took nearly three days , and we were completely offline for the duration . We also lost a day of data due to the encrypted backup . We had to prevent the possibility of this type of downtime from occurring again , so a new backup system was essential ,” he added .

THE AUTOMATED BACKUP AND RECOVERY SYSTEM ENSURES THAT BUSINESS

CRITICAL DATA IS ALWAYS AVAILABLE AND DOWNTIME IS MINIMISED .

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