Technology Reseller v38

technologyreseller.co.uk 41 DATA SECURITY to Databarracks has two main benefits. “Firstly, it saves our resources, letting us do more with less. Secondly, by working with an external service provider we add an additional layer of security to our backups,” he said. “Our Information Security Team war-game the different scenarios we face. Backups are critical to our ability to recover from several types of incident so we must keep them secure. Using a third-party service provider takes the management of backups outside our domain, and keeping further copies in Azure adds additional protection. “Backup is a perfect candidate for outsourcing. It’s critical, but it’s not a value-adding IT service and so not competency we want to spend resource on developing. We get access to the team of experts at Databarracks who do an amazing job and can reassign our people.” Strong business case Although Backup as a Service costs more than Westcoast’s previous internal solution, Harris says Westcoast was able to make a compelling business case for the change. “This took into account more than just the immediate cost-comparison. We improved our resilience, gained access to experts and were able to reassign a valuable, skilled internal resource,” he said. “Today, we are focusing on the things that help the business be more streamlined, efficient, compete in new markets and help the customer experience. Collaboration initiatives, BOTS, new warehouse technologies and software, along with mapping new business models, are just some of the many projects we are involved in as we digitise our business. “IT resilience underpins everything. If we’re offline, we don’t get back the revenue that we lose. Downtime translates very linearly to lost revenue. Backup as a Service from Databarracks is a vital component in keeping us secure, prepared and resilient.” www.databarracks.com Building on solid foundations Westcoast is underpinning its IT modernisation programme with a switch to backup as a service Four years ago, IT distributor Westcoast Limited, part of the privately held Westcoast Group, appointed Karl Harris as CIO with the remit to modernise its IT after a period of rapid growth. As part of this ongoing transformation, Harris reviewed backup provision across Westcoast’s sites, which had become time- consuming and problematic. “Backup is absolutely critical, but there is really no glory in it. It’s a disaster if it goes wrong, so we can’t allow that to happen, but it’s not necessarily the most exciting task for the team,” he said. “The solution we had worked, but it was a significant overhead with one of our engineers spending their entire time on it. That’s bad for the engineer, because it’s not the most stimulating task, and it’s bad for the organisation, because that deep expertise is limited to one person. Our IT operating model is 24/7 so we couldn’t afford to have such a critical task supported by one person.” After looking at the options, Harris decided to move to Backup as a Service provided by business continuity and IT disaster recovery provider – and existing Westcoast partner – Databarracks. “We mostly run on-prem with some services in the cloud, which run our high- volume workloads. We didn’t think about using the cloud specifically for backup, but it made sense to do so as we could use it as part of our strategy to maintain high availability across our sites. We could leverage the cloud to securely store and facilitate fast recovery of backup volumes even though we run mostly on-prem,” he explained. The solution After implementing Backup as a Service, powered by Commvault for approximately 1,000 servers and 2,000 Office 365 users across Westcoast sites, Databarracks is now responsible for the day-to-day health of all backups. It checks successes and failures with proprietary tools and trouble- shoots any issues, with its own experts on-hand 24/7 to carry-out recoveries. Harris says that outsourcing backup demand, where accounts are being opened, risk issues and so on. Users can also manage and configure their network traffic, directing, for example, 90% of activity to one service provider while sending 10% to a beta version for testing. In addition, Service Mesh gives peace of mind that all communication is secure, for example validating requests that come from outside a Container (such as new customer transactions), reducing the likelihood of a website crashing due to people bombarding it with multiple tasks. Service Mesh is effectively a fresh pair of eyes and ears, monitoring and analysing overall performance. The most popular version is Istio, but even this can still be a complex platform, requiring users to have specific knowledge levels. To simplify the process of managing multiple Microservices files, Sensedia has developed a graphical interface that enables users to better visualise network activity and tackle re-routing and security issues more quickly. Benefits Containers, Microservices and Service Mesh are crucial tools to open up new revenue streams and increase customer retention. Once a business is clear what’s happening within its IT platform, it can redirect network traffic, debug systems and launch new services without downtime, while the additional security benefits (e.g. in managing and protecting payment data, authorisation and authentication) give peace of mind to regulators, the business and its customers. These tools may add an unnecessary layer of complexity for companies that are not reliant on systems to deliver new products and services, or for those using a monolithic application. However, organisations that do want to automate more can buy in a solution and use a vendor to manage a Service Mesh implementation or run everything in-house, in which case the necessary internal expertise must be in place. https://sensedia.com Gibson Nascimento has over 14 years’ software development, agile methodology and architecture experience and is head of solutions, EMEA at global API firm Sensedia. He is an expert in Application Programming Interfaces, supporting multiple industries including retail, pharma, health insurance and banking. Sensedia, recognised by its peers as ‘visionary’ and a ‘strong performer’, has offices in Brazil, Peru and the UK.