How Disaster Recovery is Used by Bloomin Brands, RMS, Klinikum Fichtelgebirge, PLSS Solucoes, and Digital Seattle: Case Studies

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From hardware failure to ransomware attacks, numerous unforeseen situations can put a company’s data at risk. That’s why investing in a reliable disaster recovery (DR) solution can be a company’s best bet against losing important information.

See below for five case studies on how organization across industries are employing disaster recovery solutions to solve their data protection challenges:

Digital Seattle

Digital Seattle is an IT firm with a portfolio that includes IT management, business continuity, software upgrades, and IT refreshes.

After a crypto attack on their systems and a mishap at a provider’s data center, Voiko Tanev, CEO of Digital Seattle, realized the need to employ a disaster recovery solution, rather than just banking on backup storage solutions for data protection.

The previous backup provider was not properly sizing their cloud solution resources. Moreover, Digital Seattle relied on chain-based backups for data storage, which took twice as long compared to conventional backup processes and required upgrades three times a month.

“When you have clients with three or four or five terabytes of data to rebase and reseed to the cloud — it’s not something you want to be doing three times in a month, which was sometimes the case,” Tanev says.

With Axcient x360Recover, Digital Seattle overcame their legacy issues. Axcient’s chain-free backup technology helped increase the data recovery speed to a considerable extent. Moreover, the MSP-only vendors consistently updated the disaster recovery features based on recent cyberattack trends, ensuring a further level of protection against new threats to an organization’s data.

Axcient also offered additional access to 50 TB of extra storage, so Digital Seattle has some free space to transfer all of their client data during attacks or downtime. The complimentary Autoverify feature scrutinizes backups and performs DR testing, a step toward capacity building for Axcient to handle further shocks.

“With the ability to use a DR system for monthly server backup checks, we can go in and once they are configured, we just hit a button,” Tanev says. “It checks them all, and we just say, ‘Yep, I can connect to that one. Yep, I can connect to that one.’ Rather than with our previous provider, where we would have to go in and manually do it for each server individually.”

Industry: IT support

Disaster recovery provider: Axcient and Axcient x360Recover

Outcomes:

  • Assured data recovery for clients
  • Recovery speed increased to a 15-minute recovery point objective (RPO)
  • Guaranteed data recovery within one hour as soon as a disaster strikes or any data loss happens
  • Better resources optimization by streamlining vendor processes and backups

Klinikum Fichtelgebirge

Klinikum Fichtelgebirge is a flagship hospital in Bavaria, Germany, offering medical services across six specialities, with over 1,000 employees attending to about 18,000 inpatients and 27,000 outpatients at the clinic annually.

After a merger, Klinikum Fichtelgebirge did have a disaster recovery infrastructure in place, but a lack of consistent practices left the organization vulnerable to potential ransomware attacks or system failure. The hospital’s IT systems administrator Christian Schiener found that the backup processes weren’t comprehensive, they were hardly ever tested, and many of the backups relied on a manual workaround.

Moreover, Klinikum didn’t have a unified disaster recovery provider but employed small backup solutions for worst-case scenarios. Schiener knew the protection measures were inadequate in the face of a cyberattack.

Schiener’s team then decided to come up with a simple and consistent practice for disaster recovery, which included transitioning to a single backup and disaster recovery provider.

Arcserve UDP provided Klinikum Fichtelgebirge access to centralized data protection at a cost-effective budget. The implementation happened in three stages: integration of previous backups to existing Arcserve UDP license, identifying unprotected and manually backed up data across channels to unify with the Arcserve license, and creating a unified infrastructure based on a point-of-origin performance model.

“Since we’ve been using the DR solution, we’ve been able to run backups much more frequently with the same hardware and disk space. That means our risks of failures have also decreased,” Schiener says.

Industry: Health care

Disaster recovery provider: Arcserve UDP

Outcomes:

  • Downtime risks minimized
  • Backups now take minutes instead of days
  • Data transfer can occur via a 40 km radio link connecting remote facilities
  • 70% and 80% deduplication rates were achieved

PLSS Soluções

Based in southern Brazil, PLSS Soluções provides managed services for Linux and Windows servers. 

With a portfolio spanning across 150 clients, the company used a free, open-source backup tool for managing customer data. While the initial costs were minimal, PLSS Soluções incurred several other miscellaneous ownership costs.

PLSS Soluções’s backup tool lacked central monitor backup operations. Employees had no choice but to run separate backups for all their clients during disasters and downtimes. This led to a sizable increase in company costs and higher working hours for staff. The open-source backup tool also lacked strong security features, leading the company toward ransomware attacks.

With MSP360, PLSS Soluções created centralized backup and recovery infrastructure for client data, reducing staff time and deployed resources. The team can now monitor backup operations from a centralized web interface.

MSP360 also helped resolve security issues; now, it is possible for PLSS to prevent backup modifications and create an access-based model for recovered data. The limited access controls for administrators help the firm provide granular permissions for their backups remotely.

“Thanks to the significant reduction in the amount of staff time required to run backups and the ability to detect backup issues easily through centralized monitoring and reporting, managed backup recovery now comes with much lower overhead,” MSP360 says.

Industry: Operating system (OS) management

Disaster recovery provider: MSP360

Outcomes:

  • Reduced staff and time required in running backup operations
  • Centralized monitoring enables easy detection of backup issues
  • Backups now run continuously, ensuring no data record is left unprotected
  • Can now restore individual files instead of having to restore all data

RMS

RMS is an Oklahoma-based health care firm serving more than 1,000 health care providers and 45 banking partners. 

RMS works to automate the complex health care payment process by decreasing costs, speeding up the revenue cycle, and shortening days in accounts receivable.

Since the beginning, RMS had built, staffed, and run their own IT practices. However as the company grew in size, the level of technology and resources required to keep things running could no longer be internally managed.

“We had to decide what we wanted to be experts in. Remittance processing is extraordinarily complex; did we want to become IT experts too?” says Scott Thomas, founder and CEO, RMS. 

“We didn’t just need more equipment; we needed an entirely different system to move our business forward.”

Once RMS decided to work with TierPoint, the first challenge was to allow the firm to have rapid scalability while also maintaining client trust since a third-party provider had taken over data operations. TierPoint helped RMS move from a self-managed system to increasing production capacity and improving business continuity by designing a custom cloud strategy.

Industry: Health care

Disaster recovery provider: TierPoint

Outcomes:

  • The cloud configuration allows RMS to expand on demand swiftly
  • There are two additional backup sites to improve disaster recovery
  • Guaranteed 100% uptime and fail-safe business continuity protection

Bloomin Brands

The food chain Bloomin Brands has 82,000 team members working across 1,450 restaurants in 17 countries.

Bloomin Brands is always under pressure to increase scalability while also responding to customer needs. The company needed a backup and disaster recovery solution that could keep restaurant data available in the event of an emergency.

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud helped the company meet their business goals without compromising on data security. Bloomin Brands went for a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) based on Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Appliances. The move created adaptability for Bloomin Brands to respond to changing customer and employee needs.

“The fact that our Cloud OS has enabled a native DR environment was an advantage that others could not offer, making our infrastructure more scalable and giving us time to think about other matters, like optimizing our growing business,” says Marcos Antônio Nogueira, chief operations and technology officer, Bloomin Brands.

Industry: Food services

Disaster recovery provider: Nutanix, Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, and Nutanix DR

Outcomes:

  • Integrated disaster recovery with a recovery time objective (RTO) of five minutes
  • Assured data safety and business continuity
  • Realized the 10% annual growth target by scaling data centers
  • Reduced energy consumption by 40%
  • Cleared rack space by 50% after clearing unwanted backups
Avya Chaudhary
Avya Chaudhary
Avya Chaudhary is a contributor to Enterprise Storage Forum and Datamation. Previously she was an engineer with a history of experience working with NGOs and civil societies.

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