How MSPs Improve Business Continuity

By Infrascale Guest Blog 1

When an MSP asked a large agency within the State of Maryland if it could retrieve a file from six months ago with 100% confidence, the answer was no. What if the agency had to do a full system restore? What would that downtime look like? A week? A month? Even the organization’s best-case estimate wasn’t sufficient, by today’s RPO and RTO standards.

At the end of the day, the IT department at the Maryland government agency was looking to upgrade its legacy backup system, but couldn’t afford to make any more expensive upfront investments. This is why the agency turned to an MSP (SANS Technology) to simplify its disaster recovery and backup needs.

The Business Challenge: Finding a DR Solution That Could Protect Every OS and Every Server

One of SANS Technology’s customers, a large agency within the State of Maryland, was looking to move from tape backup to disk-based backup and protect an environment that included:

A major roadblock for the customer was finding a recovery and backup solution that could meet these diverse source-side and OS protection requirements. In addition, the agency needed a recovery and backup solution with an enterprise feature set and that could be deployed with minimal disruption to the agency and allow it to meet NIST data retention compliance requirements.

Why SANS Technology Selected Infrascale

While the source-side requirements narrowed the options, SANS Technology selected Infrascale as the best DR solution for the job. Gaurang Mehta, Chief Technology Officer of SANS Technology, said, “Infrascale’s powerful feature set, complete source-side and OS protection, and advanced software and deduplication technology made the decision easy.” He knew that Infrascale could provide the intelligent recovery and backup solution that SANS Technology’s customers needed to transform their approach to DR. 

Results: Transforming Recovery for a Government Agency

SANs Technology deployed Infrascale’s Data Protection Appliance on-premise at the government agency and its data to a virtual data protection appliance that was being hosted in SANS Technology’s compliant data center. The impact was immediate.

The agency tripled its backup speed and was impressed with the speed of the VM backups, which are snapshot-based. The true enterprise-class “aha” moment came when the agency saw the power of the deduplication technology. Since it’s hardware and software in one solution, it all works seamlessly. And the agency couldn’t believe it was getting all of this at such an affordable price point, without the huge upfront investment. Overall, the government agency reported a reduction in hardware, software, maintenance and staff costs.

“More than all the tangible benefits, there were plenty of intangible perks,” said Mehta. The reactive nature of dealing with backups and recovery just went away. Replacing frustration with push-button recovery delivered an automatic improvement in meeting RPO and RTO objectives.

Plans for the Future

The success achieved with the government agency is being heralded as the new backup model that should be adopted statewide. This will be a model that will continue to help other Maryland agencies, offices and municipalities simplify backup and recovery, reduce costs, increase recovery reliability and comply with NIST compliance standards. Mehta also expects his customers will want to take advantage of Infrascale’s endpoint protection and 15 minute failover. “With Infrascale, backup and recovery is so simple, you’ll never believe you thought it had to be so complex,” he said.

You can read the complete case study or download your DRaaS kit to begin capitalizing on one of the fastest-growing sectors in the cloud market.

Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.