CASE STUDY
H
eadquartered in Johannesburg,
ContinuitySA’s client base
consists mainly of large and listed
organisations, government departments and
the in-country operations of multinational
organisations. It operates the continent’s
biggest network of recovery centres, with
more than 20,000m² of space in Gauteng,
the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal
in South Africa, as well as in Botswana,
Mozambique, Kenya and Mauritius. departments and the in-country operations
of multinational organisations.
The business challenge “For example, our customers are
increasingly concerned about ransomware
and its potential impact on their businesses.
There is also a strong drive to ensure client
data is better protected and aligned to
compliance requirements.”
Even though ContinuitySA has historically
focused on delivering BCM solutions to those
in financial services, it has been receiving
interest from companies across industry
sectors. Most of its client base consists of
large and listed organisations, government
“Our clients are looking for dependable
intelligent data management solutions to
protect them from operational and security
threats in an evolving landscape, while
managing costs and ensuring their IT staff
can focus on profit-generating activities,”
said Bradley Janse van Rensburg, CTO
of ContinuitySA.
To fulfil this need, ContinuitySA must
be able to deliver solutions based on
strong business continuity principles. The
technology that this is based on must also
have extensive applicability that range from
data availability, replication and recovery, to
testing, reporting, and providing alternative
workplaces, ultimately allowing it to
intelligently manage data for its users.
“For our clients, hyper-availability means that
their critical data and systems are accessible
when required to conduct their business and
that unexpected interruptions are responded
to fast enough to ensure successful recovery
before the business is negatively impacted,”
added van Rensburg.
OVER THE LAST FEW YEARS, WE
HAVE HAD MULTIPLE INSTANCES
OF OUR CLIENTS BEING RECOVERED
DURING OUTAGES.
As such, most of its customers have stringent
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and
availability requirements in place. Downtime
on critical systems during essential times
could result in significant financial and
reputational damage if recovery does not
happen quickly enough.
“In this fast-paced environment, our major
pain points with other solutions have been
www.intelligentcio.com
their slow rate of development to new
technologies and use cases,” said
van Rensburg.
“This resulted in our clients unable to make
use of all the latest ICT innovations as the
legacy provider was not keeping pace with the
rate of technology adoption. This negatively
impacted on their ability to use replication
technology that was not able to keep up with
the rate of technology innovation occurring in
other business systems.”
ContinuitySA was looking for a solution that
could enha nce its offering and more effectively
deliver on the customer value proposition.
“Initially, we chose Veeam because of its
excellent compatibility with virtualisation
technologies at an attractive price point,”
added van Rensburg.
“As we started using it more extensively,
we were satisfied with their continued
development and improvement as well as
their exciting roadmap of future features
and benefits. They became a great company
with which to work and partner.”
The Veeam solution
For ContinuitySA, Veeam has been a crucial
solution in assisting its clients overcome
availability challenges.
“Over the last few years, we have had multiple
instances of our clients being recovered
during outages,” said van Rensburg.
“An extreme example is where a logistics
company was attacked with a targeted
ransomware outbreak that infected all its
servers, desktops and networked attached
storage. The only systems recoverable were
those protected with our Veeam to ExaGrid
technology and most recoveries were
successfully completed within a few hours of
the attack.
“With Veeam, our clients can focus on
profitable, innovative and high-quality
service delivery for their companies and have
the assurance they remain protected and
recoverable when needed.”
From a technology perspective, Veeam
has compatibility with both VMware and
Hyper-V as well as universal storage APIs,
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