ContinuitySA, a leading African provider of business continuity management services to public and private sector organisations, chose Veeam Availability Suite to help deliver dependable disaster recovery and business continuity solutions as a fully managed service with predictable recoverability for its customers across industry sectors.
Headquartered in Johannesburg, ContinuitySA’s client base consists mainly of large and listed organisations, government departments and the in-country operations of multinational organisations. It operates the continent’s biggest network of recovery centres, with more than 20,000m² of space in Gauteng, the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, as well as in Botswana, Mozambique, Kenya, and Mauritius.
The business challenge
Even though ContinuitySA has historically focused on delivering BCM solutions to those in financial services, it has been receiving interest from companies across industry sectors. Most of its client base consists of large and listed organisations, government departments and the in-country operations of multinational organisations.
“Our clients are looking for dependable intelligent data management solutions to protect them from operational and security threats in an evolving landscape, while managing costs and ensuring their IT staff can focus on profit-generating activities,” said Bradley Janse van Rensburg, CTO of ContinuitySA.
“For example, our customers are increasingly concerned about ransomware and its potential impact on their businesses. There is also a strong drive to ensure client data is better protected and aligned to compliance requirements.”
To fulfil this need, ContinuitySA must be able to deliver solutions based on strong business continuity principles. The technology that this is based on must also have extensive applicability that range from data availability, replication, and recovery, to testing, reporting, and providing alternative workplaces, ultimately allowing it to intelligently manage data for its users.
“For our clients, hyper-availability means that their critical data and systems are accessible when required to conduct their business, and that unexpected interruptions are responded to fast enough to ensure successful recovery before the business is negatively impacted.”
As such, most of its customers have stringent Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and availability requirements in place. Downtime on critical systems during essential times could result in significant financial and reputational damage if recovery does not happen quickly enough.
“In this fast-paced environment, our major pain points with other solutions have been their slow rate of development to new technologies and use cases,” said van Rensburg.
“This resulted in our clients unable to make use of all the latest ICT innovations as the legacy provider was not keeping pace with the rate of technology adoption. This negatively impacted on their ability to use replication technology that was not able to keep up with the rate of technology innovation occurring in other business systems.”
ContinuitySA was looking for a solution that could enhance its offering and more effectively deliver on the customer value proposition.
“Initially, we chose Veeam because of its excellent compatibility with virtualisation technologies at an attractive price point,” added van Rensburg.
“As we started using it more extensively, we were satisfied with their continued development and improvement as well as their exciting roadmap of future features and benefits. They became a great company with which to work and partner.”
The Veeam solution
For ContinuitySA, Veeam has been a crucial solution in assisting its clients overcome availability challenges.
“Over the last few years, we have had multiple instances of our clients being recovered during outages,” said van Rensburg.
“An extreme example is where a logistics company was attacked with a targeted ransomware outbreak that infected all its servers, desktops and networked attached storage. The only systems recoverable were those protected with our Veeam to ExaGrid technology and most recoveries were successfully completed within a few hours of the attack.
“With Veeam, our clients can focus on profitable, innovative and high-quality service delivery for their companies and have the assurance they remain protected and recoverable when needed.
From a technology perspective, Veeam has compatibility with both VMware and Hyper-V as well as universal storage APIs, 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.”
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. 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 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 technologies, we free them up to focus on other key tasks within the data centre. Working with ContinuitySA, we are able to provide its customers with a data management solution that gives that confidence that their business will be ‘always on’ when they need it most.”
The results
- Delivers Hyper-Availability of applications and data
“While our focus has traditionally been on the financial services sector, we have expanded to deliver solutions across industries,” said van Resnburg. Our customers are accessing more data across numerous devices across the length and breadth of the country. With Veeam, we ensure that they have Hyper-Availability to their mission-critical data.” - Integrates with any client environment across multiple industry sectors, enabling ContinuitySA to protect hundreds of workloads for various clients
ContinuitySA currently manages multiple clients, comprising of large and listed organisations, government departments, nd the in-country operations of multinational organisations, using Veeam Availability Suite protecting hundreds of workloads - Veeam continually evolves to reflect customer needs
“As we use Veeam more extensively, we have been satisfied with its continued development and improvements as well as the exciting roadmap of future features and benefits,” said van Rensburg.
