ContinuitySA, an African provider of business continuity management services to public and private sector organisations, has selected 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.
“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,” says Bradley Janse van Rensburg, chief technology officer of ContinuitySA. “There is also a strong drive to ensure client data is better protected and aligned to compliance requirements. Veeam is able to fulfill those demands and deliver high-speed file recovery from verified backups in a matter of seconds.”
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.
“The positive impact extends to time-savings as well. 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. This reflects the growing importance of being hyper-available to meet stakeholder demand,” adds Janse van Rensburg.
“Modern business requires a new level of data uptime, which we refer to as ‘hyper-availability’,” says 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.”
Most of ContinuitySA’s 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.
One of the biggest challenges ContinuitySA had prior to partnering with Veeam was the fact that other solutions were slow to adapt to new technologies. This meant clients were unable to make use of all the latest ICT innovations as legacy backup and recovery solutions were not keeping pace with technological change.
In particular, this negatively impacted on their ability to use replication technology.
“Initially, we chose Veeam because of its excellent compatibility with virtualisation technologies at an attractive price point. As we started using it more extensively, we were satisfied with its ease of use
and 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.
“Our clients have been very satisfied with Veeam’s hyper-availability offering. From data corruptions, system failures, accidental deletions, and malicious ransomware attacks – we have been consistently successful in recovering our clients’ data when they have experienced outages, and in doing so have helped their businesses overcome data downtime,” concludes Janse van Rensburg.