SEACOM Transforms Averda’s Data Management with Redstor

Providing African businesses with years of industry experience and expertise, leading service provider, SEACOM, recently helped top waste management company, Averda, to drive increased efficiency and productivity through the use of Redstor – a pioneering data management and protection solution.

With 2 500 employees across South Africa, Averda offers integrated end-to-end waste management services to government, industries, and hospitals. By providing essential services, including the collection and recycling of domestic and industrial waste and the safe disposal of hazardous materials, Averda needed an effective way to monitor and manage its extensive data.

New technology partner SEACOM recommended the use of Redstor, and since implementation, Averda has enjoyed slashed data management overheads, reduced disaster recovery times, and backups no longer impacting working hours.

Redstor’s unique technology also frees up valuable time for Averda’s IT staff to focus on business-driven initiatives and recovers data without delay, minimising the company’s downtime in the event of a server failure, ransomware attack or unintentionally deleted files. All in all, the simplified solution saves the waste management company hours every week.

Angus Smith, Group ICT Manager at Averda, explained: “As part of going live with a new fibre-optic, SD wide-area network in 2017, we migrated to a complete virtual data centre, moving all of our core servers off-premise through SEACOM in one large exercise. We were set on using tried and tested service providers at the top of their game, and SEACOM is one of the biggest players in the African continent.”

“Part of the deal was getting a state-of-the-art backup solution. After seeing several presentations, I opted for Redstor, and it’s now on about 30 devices, protecting close to 4TB of business-critical data on nine core servers as well as multiple branch-based servers. It’s great to have everything – fibre-optic links, backups, the data centre offering – all under one contract,” Smith added.

Simplified data management is another appealing benefit – Redstor's web-based control centre provides Smith with a centralised view of Averda’s complex data estate at any time, on any device. Redstor was designed to have minimal or no human intervention throughout its daily management. Cloud backups run on an automated schedule, allowing users to back up data as little or as often as they like – no human error, no risk.

Redstor’s intelligent technology also encrypts data at the source, deduplicates and compresses it. Not only does this greatly reduce the size of each file transmitted, making it bandwidth-efficient, but only changed data is transmitted and stored – radically reducing costs.

Another massive saving is bouncing back quickly from issues – Redstor’s unique streaming gives Averda staff access to what they need when they need it, recovering massive systems seemingly in moments.

“It’s very different now with Redstor. We had a server outage last year and managed to rebuild the server, virtualise it and restore everything fast enough to avoid any staff downtime,” explained Smith.

And with transparent, cost-effective, and predictable pricing, Redstor’s subscription-based pricing model allows businesses to scale up or down as their demand changes without worrying about any hidden costs.

“This means we know exactly what we will pay every month. If we need to go over our agreed data limit, we have the option to pay for a little additional storage. So, in the case of an emergency, it’s all very straightforward,” added Smith.

One final reassurance? In the event of a ransomware attack, Averda is now able to recover all data and systems to a state before infection. With Redstor, backups are isolated from Averda’s live environment so they can't be targeted by cybercriminals. The company’s data is also encrypted before it leaves any devices – and it remains encrypted, in transit and storage.

Smith concluded: “Redstor is extremely easy to use. It is intuitive and reliable, which is critical for us. It’s very straightforward – you don’t have to be an IT guru to drive it.”