Client story Scale up Business While Making Cost Savings
By Insight UK / 2 Jul 2019 / Topics: Modern infrastructure Cloud Microsoft Azure
Insight moved its data replication from an on-premise solution to cold storage in Azure. The Azure solution makes it easy for Insight to backup, store and access its data without spending time and money on hardware, configuration and support agreements.
By moving its replication to the cloud, Insight has gained cost benefits and freed up expert personnel to develop new infrastructure projects. The project brings Insight a step closer to the vision of its next generation architecture.
The Challenge
Insight had previously been managing its data backups and secondary copies completely on premise. The data was backed up to a data domain appliance which sent a copy of that backup to another appliance situated in the data centre.
One of the challenges with this approach was keeping the data replication up to date due to limitations inherent in the backup appliances. If not all the data was present on the backup system at any one time, the full copy could not be completed.
In the event of needing to restore data, there was a risk that the appliance would not provide an exact working copy of the original data. As a result, backup management became very time intensive, tying up resources and slowing the business down.
Having an on-premise data replication system also meant that Insight had to refresh its hardware regularly and pay for hardware and software support.
Insight required a better solution for its data replication, as well as a way to reduce the costs associated with on-premise backups and ability to free up the expertise of its workforce to focus on infrastructure projects.
The Solution
Insight has rehoused data replication from an onpremise to a cloud solution. Rather than sending a mirror of its data to its on-premise data centre, Insight now uses software within its backup system to send data to Azure. The new cold storage solution takes secondary copies of all the data without the need for costly appliances, effectively removing the middleman.
Insight is no longer paying for product support agreements, hardware refresh cycles and the electricity to power the system.
The solution removes the need for Insight to manage the maintenance of its on-premise systems. Previously, computing teams would need to make code upgrades, hardware refreshes and multiple tweaks to the system to keep everything running smoothly. With Azure Cold Storage, Insight can ‘set it and forget it’.
With Azure Cold Storage, Insight can retrieve data much faster as the data and everything related to it is now stored within easily accessible configuration files. Rehousing its data replication to the cloud means that the team spends less time on routine backup tasks and more time on developing Insight’s next generation architecture.
