Pernod Ricard has operations and IT investments in 42 markets in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, making it difficult for the company to consolidate its business data and IT systems.
The company has separate IT teams in each country maintaining and managing their own backup systems. This includes having separate e-mail, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and business intelligence systems. In turn, each one of these systems has its own data that the company considers vital to its operations, and should be backed up, secured and made accessible to different users.
After all these years, the company has a variety of backup systems and disaster recovery solutions at their 42 offices, thus making everything very complex. Not only does having numerous solutions bring in different features, it also has different processes as well as different terms with the service providers. So the company decided to get a centralized backup and disaster recovery solution for its 42 EMEA facilities, to help it make sure that all important business data are protected and stored in a remote location.
The company’s IT team decided to use cloud backup and managed services from Backup Technology to do just that. This helped them get an effective backup system throughout its EMEA operations and gave them a remote disaster recovery system. The company slowly rolled out the solution, starting with its Germany and United Kingdom offices, and then continuing with other locations such as Russia, Switzerland, Ukraine and Turkey. The company expects that around 3/4s of all their EMEA offices will be onboard by the end of 2014.
The challenges
The company did encounter some problems along the way, however. Not every location had the same big systems, revenues, data as UK and Germany. Even internet speeds differed from one country to the next. So they had to make sure that the solution they chose was scalable. With the chosen solution, they were able to implement local backups so that it was very speedy to recover and access the data that each local user needed, while also having an offsite backup solution that provided them with secure protection for the long term. All backups are fully visible using the provider’s web portal, so the company’s IT personnel were able to see the status of their backups anytime anywhere.
Testing in real life
The company was able to test their systems using real life situations that proved that their disaster recovery solution works as it should, being able to recover individual files, e-mails and databases. Not only did the solution work smoothly, but the company’s IT teams were able to give feedback to the provider to help them improve recovery times and add features that they deemed important.
With the new backup and disaster recovery system, the company was able to make sure that their data was protected. It currently protects at least 350 terabytes of data and all markets have access to disaster recovery services provided from a single provider. This allowed the company’s local IT teams to focus on other tasks. All these while also taking advantage of a simpler system that proved easier to manage and monitor.
Looking to get the same benefits that Pernod Ricard is currently enjoying with their backup and disaster recovery solution? Call Four Cornerstone today and take a step in the right direction.
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Photo by Pernod Ricard.
