Immutable backup for business continuity & disaster recovery

Protecting a design and manufacturing business from data loss and disaster with on-site and off-site backup.

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Customer: Blue Sky Designs
Location: Otley, West Yorkshire
System Installed: Veeam Backup and Wasabi

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Overview

Blue Sky began their journey from a home office in 2002 and originally sold the rights to their gift ideas to other companies. In 2006, they progressed to manufacturing their own products and in 2012 moved into the licensed product sector.

In 2023, their head office is based in Otley, and they are one of the UK’s leading gift, stationery, luggage and lunch ware suppliers. They develop and sell their own products, as well as selling under an extensive range of licenses, working with many major UK retailers and independent stores. 50% of their entire workforce are designers, reflecting the huge creative aspect to their business.

Key outcomes

  • Reduced operational costs of 80% owing to cost saving on cloud backup storage
  • On-site backup with off-site cloud replication, allowing for faster data restoration
  • Enhanced data security and additional ransomware protection through immutable cloud backup
  • Proactively monitored backups and status reports configured to allow the client full visibility of backup progress
  • Data no longer stored across multiple devices
  • Compliance with GDPR data regulations
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The challenge

The nature of Blue Sky’s work means they are working with large artwork files on a daily basis and were saving these to the on-site server and multiple NAS storage devices.

The backup solution in place when Blue Sky came to Primary Technology for their Managed IT Support had not only become expensive, but the client was suffering backup failures and a lack of support for backup recovery and restoration.

The backup solution in place was cloud-only and the backup of multiple terabytes of data was affecting operation costs at the business. In addition, they were unable to backup NAS archive data and there was a shortfall in backup alerts and monitoring. With the client’s data growing fast and being spread across multiple devices, providing reliable, cost-effective, scalable and secure data protection was Primary Technology’s priority.

The solution

Primary Technology undertook an assessment of the current backup strategy, presenting the findings, feedback and recommendations. Primary Technology then worked with the senior management team to design and implement a new Windows Server 2022 Standard server environment. New VMs were setup and data from the old server and various NAS devices were migrated to the new VMs.

Primary Technology were aware that an on-premise solution, without off-site copying, didn’t guarantee optimal data security in the event of an attack. Veeam was installed as the backup solution, with Wasabi as the off-site cloud storage. Veeam has a proven track record in the industry for reliability and excellent support.

Adding an off-site copy to the existing on-site architecture was a key choice to ensure the resilience of the backup against cyber-attacks, natural disasters, hardware failure and human error. Furthermore, using Object Lock for immutability means the backup data cannot be tampered with, deleted or modified, adding further protection against cyber-criminals. With the rise of ransomware, having an immutable backup has become critical for data recovery as this type of backup cannot be altered in any way.

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Testimonial

  • We are very pleased with our decision to migrate our IT services to Primary Technology.

    From the initial IT review, we could see that they offered a blend of customer care and technical expertise. They identified security vulnerabilities and key areas for improvement in our priority IT services such as backups and Microsoft Office 365, and with their expertise, we have seen cost savings in these areas.

    Claire Morton, Merchandise Manager, Blue Sky Designs

The outcome

Blue Sky Designs now have a robust backup solution in place, that not only provides fast data recovery if required, but they can be assured their data is protected against all eventualities with immutable, GDPR-compliant backups.

The client has a clear view of their backup strategy incorporating on-site backup and restoration, as well as off-site backup and recovery, which forms the essential backbone of their disaster recovery and continuity planning.

Partnerships & accreditations

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