Direct-to-Cloud Disaster Recovery Enables EDC to Deliver Near-Instant Business Availability After a Hurricane

Lacking the Vertical Capacity for Disaster Recovery

As the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Enterprise Data Concepts (EDC), Roddy Bergeron makes sure clients meet the three tenants of the CIA triad: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. While evaluating EDC’s Veeam cloud in the EDC data center, Roddy recognized an issue with availability. Based in South Central Louisiana, EDC and their clients are frequently threatened by potentially devastating natural disasters, like hurricanes and tropical storms. Roddy asked himself, “If all of our clients were down for an extended period of time, could we spin them up in our data center?” Unfortunately, the vertical capacity to spin clients up in a timely manner was not something EDC could do within their Veeam infrastructure.

With all of their client data in EDC’s data center, the restore process following a hurricane could take up to a week. Roddy explains, “We would have to run a lot of hardware out to our data center, our colocation. It would be pretty hard, and by the time we got clients up and running, they may already have power. Not a lot of people can take a week of downtime, but with our Veeam solution, we were really hamstrung on what we could do.”

EDC’s cyber liability insurance also took note of their high-risk environment and increased the premium on their policy. With hurricane season coming, insurance rates rising, and EDC questioning the security of their data center, Roddy knew it was time to reevaluate their backup and disaster recovery solution. He says, “When we looked at the increase to our cyber liability policy and the cost of moving to a new provider, it was time to move. We couldn’t hold that data anymore.”

Lowering Total Costs While Increasing Security

After evaluating vendors, Roddy and EDC chose Axcient x360Recover Direct-to-Cloud (D2C) and x360Cloud as their backup and disaster recovery solutions. “When it came down to the total cost of ownership, liability, and security, we couldn’t engineer our Veeam product to meet those needs. That’s why we moved to Axcient,” Roddy says. “It was easy to deploy, easy to use, easy to implement. Overall, it’s a pretty slick product.” Now EDC data backs up directly to the Axcient cloud, which lowers their liability so they can maintain affordable cyber liability insurance.

Hardware-free deployment and the ability to repurpose their Veeam servers has contributed to lowering EDC’s total cost of ownership further. Direct-to-Cloud (D2C) hardware-free business continuity and disaster recovery allows MSPs to deploy silently through their RMM tools, configure a backup schedule, and that’s it. No ‘rip and replace’ or expensive hardware requiring costly maintenance and onsite visits. Instead, EDC was able to migrate 80-90% of their clients to D2C within just 30 days of deployment. Roddy says, “When we look at the features we get with Axcient – the ability to spin up in the cloud, the retention history we get without having to add more hardware, and the costs we would have incurred with our own data center, there are significant cost savings at the end of the day.”

Recovering from Hurricane Ida in Hours, Not Days

Less than six months after EDC moved to Axcient, x360Recover D2C was put to the test when Hurricane Ida touched down in Louisiana. Roddy says all 25 New Orleans clients were without power and internet for at least four days. Five clients reached out to EDC to restore data to maintain essential business operations like payroll. Still new to Axcient, EDC hadn’t tested the restore process with D2C. Regardless, after just 30 minutes on the phone with Axcient support, EDC had their first client runbook running in the cloud.

“Clients were happy. It’s good to be able to get them up and running when they don’t have power or internet. We can’t help with that stuff or damage to the office, but at least we have a solution to keep their business running. Whereas before, with Veeam, we couldn’t spin up five clients in our data center that quick. We’d have to run a lot of hardware to our data center. It could have taken a week.” Roddy goes on to say, “I’m glad we moved because now I can tell clients, ‘don’t worry, we did an automated test restore yesterday, and your data was good.’ Some clients have access to their Axcient portal so they can actually see the backups themselves and don’t need us to confirm anything.”

Axcient’s comprehensive partner approach has also proven valuable outside of disaster recovery. Roddy explains, “Whenever something would happen with Veeam that required a lot of heavy networking, that issue automatically went to an engineer. Now, our helpdesk can take those tickets, and if they have issues they put in a ticket with Axcient and it’s handled.” With complete support of their backup environment and a tried-and-true BDR solution, EDC can confidently protect clients from natural disasters while growing their business with best-in-class solutions.