Agriculture

Protecting a Growing Company with Private Cloud Services

Artificial Intelligence and other technology have made it possible for a company in the mature farming industry to generate rapid growth.  This company’s ability to apply advanced technology has improved product quality, saved money, and reduced time to market. 

To support its expansion, the company partnered with Blue Hill/CAPS to implement a secure Private Cloud data backup solution that increases resiliency, fulfills compliance requirements, and saves money.

Challenges

The company’s CTO and database manager recognized their current data backup system was insufficient to support future growth because it lacked functionality and key security requirements. The company had been using Windows Server software to backup databases each week to network attached storage. There was no offsite replication, and the ability to restore backups only allowed restoration of an entire server at a time.

Their Senior management is committed to driving itself to the highest standards. They are investing in its technology infrastructure and procedures to comply with standards such as GDPR, Sarbanes Oxley, and SSAE-18/SOC 1, SOC 2. They believed their current data backup system was not robust enough to support their required compliance requirements.

Solution

The Blue Hill/CAPS team recommended their secure Private Cloud Data Backup and Replication solution. Utilizing powerful Veeam Availability Suite software, data is copied up from the company’s production servers collocated at CAPS’ secure data center to a backup storage appliance to the CAPS Private Cloud. 

Blue Hill/CAPS is one of the very few IT service providers in the Northeast offering 24/7 service, in a secure Private Cloud data center with unlimited availability, with 3 data centers  located a safe distance apart but close enough to minimize latency and maximize service. The backups are replicated to their production data center in New York State, offering a secure Private Cloud storage facility located about 80 miles from their Connecticut data center. 

The Veeam Availability Suite software automates backup and replication and reports the success of each task in real-time to both the customer and the Blue Hill/CAPS team. Replication between the two data centers is over a high bandwidth circuit. The replicated data is protected both at rest and in transit, using AES-256 encryption.

Results

Transition to the new backup system only took a few days including the time required to train customer personnel. Multiple servers with several Terabytes of data were backed up locally and also replicated to the remote data center site. 

The power of the new system was immediately apparent to the Database Manager who was thrilled with the system’s ability perform restorations on a granular level.

“Now we can restore individual schemas instead of being forced to restore an entire database. This will make it possible for us to resolve problems faster and provide much better service to our users.”

Plus, the CTO is excited about the money he will be saving.

“We have already saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by repatriating our large databases from the Public Cloud to Blue Hill/CAPS private cloud environment. That is what motivated us to move our database servers to Blue Hill/CAPS a few years ago, when we decided to use colocation to save the money we had been spending on egress fees. We are pleased to be expanding our services, so that we can expect to save even more money with the Blue Hill/CAPS Private Cloud backup solution.”

Agriculture

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