Setting the Scene
When Shaheed Mahomed, Network Communications Specialist at Assupol Life, joined the company, he took over the disaster recovery strategy and he became extremely concerned about the current system. Assupol Life was using Symantec™ Backup Exec 2009 and after much perseverance,Assupol Life was unable to utilise the current backups effectively. This was particularly worrying for a number of reasons, the primary one being that the data being backed up to the servers is business-critical.
Mahomed explains that, "A financial services company system downtimecan directly affect the company’s performance." Assupol Life usesspecialist accounting software such as Accpac and Pastel systems, and the data from these systems needs to be constantly backed up at all times.
Backup & Recovery that works
Assupol Life ran a comprehensive disaster recovery testing period for a period of three months to establish which vendor could best cater for their requirements and offered the strongest solution. Highlighting the gravity of the job at hand, Mahomed said: "The entire company, from the actuaries to our legal and HR departments, is totally reliant on the IT team to protect the business-critical data stored on our servers. In fact, the IT team reports directly to our CEO who is naturally very dependent on the data. As such, we spent a long time testing to ensure we deployed the best solution and one we could really rely on."
Assupol Life tested around ten different solutions, including CA Arcserve®, and in the quest to find the most efficient and reliable solution to meet the needs of Assupol Life, Acronis® Backup & Recovery™ 10 was recommended on an internet forum. Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 was tested at length across Assupol Life’s servers and we were impressed with its capabilities. In comparison to the backups not working at all when they were using Symantec Backup Exec 9, they could now restore a crashed server in less than two hours. Assupol Life was also particularly impressed with the Acronis® Universal Restore™ feature which enabled them to restore todissimilar hardware five times faster than before.
Assupol Life proceeded to work with the Acronis authorised South African Distributor, Synapsys. Arthur Williamson from Synapsys worked with Mahomed to install 18 Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Advanced licences and one Acronis®Recovery™ for Microsoft® Exchange Server license in February 2010. Assupol Life relies on an end-of-day backup strategy and also takes a full new backup at the beginning of each week. All backups are made to USB disks which are then sent to a secure vault. Compliance is compulsory for the organisation, with a legal requirement that data be retained for a period of five years.
Since installing the solution Assupol Life has been extremely pleased with the benefits, with all of their previous backup and recovery issues having been resolved. Mahomed explained that, "Quite simply, the solution works! Since theinstallation we haven’t experienced one backup that we haven’t been able to restore and the speed of recovery is the best on the market. The solution is intuitive and easy to use, allowing us to work from one central management console."
The solution allows all the employees at Assupol Life to backup their workstations to a central server which has time-saving benefits, whilst also having the added benefit of ‘rollback’, which the company finds particularly useful. In the case of a virus attack, for example Assupol Life can simply roll back to the latest backup and have its systems back up and running again. Assupol Life tends to use the restore functionalities 2-3 times every month and has not experienced any issues yet. The Acronis solutions also offer total protection for the company’s email server, ensuring that the company’s emails are safeguarded.
Assupol Life and Acronis: The Future
Assupol Life continues to work with Acronis Distributor Synapsys and Acronis Support. "We have been so impressed with the Acronis solution that Assupol Life plans to double its Acronis® Backup & Recovery™ 10 Advanced Server licenses within months. Acronis’ software has proven itself in a challenging environment and backup failure is no longer a problem for us," Mahomed observes.
Assupol Life is also currently working on an evaluation of the company’s virtual infrastructure and is looking at virtualisation technologies such as VMWare® and Citrix® systems. "In the future, we may consider using Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Advanced Sever Virtual Edition to protect these virtual machines," Concludes Mahomed
About Assupol Life
Assupol Life has seen many changes over the past 95 years of its existence. It is not only a tremendous achievement to survive in the Financial Industry for such a period of time, but it also means that we have gained a great deal of experience. We have broadened our scope of financial services, products and management to shift our customer base in order to compete effectively in the South African market.
The Assupol Life Group is an authorised financial services provider that is tailored to address its clients’ insurance needs in a variety of ways. The company is well-known for its excellent and affordable products, its outstanding client service and its high standard of customer care. We proved that only the best is good enough for our valued clients. Assupol Life has become a household name especially among the lower income market, but due to the nature of our products, we caught the interest of the middle and high-income groups and today have thousands of satisfied clients in this category as well. We are actively involved in grass-roots level sport development and the upliftment of underprivileged communities.
The Assupol Life Group of Companies has offices across South Africa. This means that our offices are accessible to all our clients should they need any information or assistance. We boast well-trained and friendly staff members who are ready to provide assistance whenever needed.
For additional information please visit: http://www.assupol.co.za/.
About Acronis
Acronis is a leading provider of easy-to-use backup, recovery and security solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments. Its patented disk imaging technology enables corporations, SMBs and consumers to protect their digital assets. With Acronis’ disaster recovery, deployment and migration software, users protect their digital information, maintain business continuity and reduce downtime. Acronis software is sold in more than 180 countries and available in 13 languages. For additional information, www.acronis.eu. Follow Acronis on Twitter: http://twitter.com/acronis.
Acronis Inc. Backup software.