Data Backup and Recovery – Case Study

Client Industry = Engineering

Number of Client Locations = 10 locations (320 end users)

The Client’s IT Challenge:

This client’s existing backup solution was developing into an unwieldy situation. Their backup protocol required depositing physical tapes at an inconvenient remote storage facility Worse, as the amount of data to be backed up and stored significantly expanded, the amount of time needed to complete these backups became unsustainable.

Additionally, the client lacked a comprehensive way of handling backups across a distributed environment consisting of both physical and virtual servers. The organization needed access to a local copy of its data that could be restored quickly while safeguarding the data from unexpected disasters and cybertheft.

How The Lerepco Group Met This Challenge:

  • After a thorough IT evaluation, Lerepco decided a multi-pronged approach would best serve this client’s nine remote sites. We wanted to ensure local-data availability (even during a local-server failure) and successful data backups.
  • We first implemented Microsoft’s Distributed File System (DFS) solution to copy each remote location’s data to the client’s corporate data center.
  • In the event of a remote-server failure, end users would have immediate access to the replicated data at the data center (via a mapped drive to a virtual server).
  • We next implemented Barracuda Backup to create data redundancy to a local storage device (Barracuda’s Purpose-Built Backup Appliance) and over the Internet to the cloud, eliminating tapes.
  • Agents (software programs) now installed on all of the servers allow for instantaneous data backups. Only new or modified data is transferred to local storage and the cloud.
  • An additional benefit of the Barracuda Backup: It dedupes, compresses and encrypts all transmitted data, minimizing the time needed to complete the process.
  • All data sent to the cloud now travels over encrypted connections, ensuring the files are unusable if intercepted during transit, and they remain in a “scrambled” format while stored “at rest” in secure domestic data centers.

With the time reclaimed by our client when backing up data, and the IT consistency created across all of the company’s remote locations, we feel we’ve “engineered” for them a competitive, more productive edge.