Client
The client is an accounting firm based in Chicago with 30 years experience in the industry. They offer bookkeeping, auditing, tax, advisory, and accounting services. Their client base includes small businesses, individual investors, banks and entities for whom they provide tax preparation services.
In the last three years, they have acquired two other accounting firms expanding their portfolio of clients and services.
Challenges
The client had migrated their systems several times and had used different backup strategies. When Aquarius took over the client’s IT management, it was noted that their backup strategy was designed with good intentions, but it wasn’t aligned with industry best practices, and a more sophisticated, robust solution.
The challenge for this client was to ensure that business continuity and data backup standards were created, as the infrastructure comprised of dissimilar hardware and software, due to recent acquisitions.
The issues were obvious when accessing old data that was stored on old servers and with backups that were not consistent.
In the past, backups were created and stored on the network storage device and then copied to a portable device to be taken offsite. This practice, although fairly stable, required human interaction and thus was prone to failure.
The client required a good, reliable backup solution.
Solution
Veeam Backup and Replication software was provisioned to allow for reliable image-based backups that can utilize multiple location depositories, including the cloud. Once the backup infrastructure is in place, data can be easily retrieved from multiple locations
By implementing this solution at the firm, the following was accomplished:
- backup solution worked in virtualized environments.
- ability to back up virtual machines as well as physical machines.
- ability to restore the virtual machines in Azure or to replicate directly.
- restore individual Active Directory, Exchange, and guest file items by using built-in backup browsers allowing for a fast selective restore.
- replicate backups to a private cloud, thus meeting the requirement for an offsite backup location.
The backup-copy feature allows for the latest incremental backup changes completed on the local backup, to be copied and sent to an alternate location, in this case, the cloud repository.
Results
The firm now has a well-designed backup strategy that’s reliable, and redundant and improves their disaster recovery plan, providing the client peace of mind.
The solution is easily managed and transparent, and includes email notifications with activity logs that the client can utilize for their compliance requirements. The solution also provides means for fast recovery in the event of a disaster, thus adding a major component to the Business Continuity Plan
The client had improved their measurable recovery time, as data can still be recovered locally much faster, along with extended data retention times due to virtually unlimited storage in the cloud.
Since Veeam backups are “forever incremental” setting up a backup copy means that only the changes from the previous incremental backup are copied to the cloud. And that’s faster, saving time.
Backup data is managed from the Veeam console, so everything is a single-pan window, with local backups, storage, cloud data, and disks.. This means data can be restored from any location.
Another handy feature is that backups can be restored to an alternate location, including Azure, thus improving the disaster recovery strategy.
Regular testing of the client backup is managed by the Aquarius Support Desk every month. With this solution, testing onsite and cloud backup can occur in minutes. The entire server can be restored in a test environment to confirm that it actually works.
A bonus to this solution is that the client now has a rock-solid solution for cybersecurity. This is due to keeping multiple encrypted backups which allows for a quick restore if client data gets corrupted by malware.
The firm has plans to migrate its infrastructure and services to a full Azure cloud-based solution. With this, Veam backup will continue to provide backup data management with the additional cloud-only modules.
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