By Jordan Tazewell, disaster recovery engineer, Insight Global, LLC
Like many organizations, Insight Global relies on a range of mission-critical applications to keep operations running. As a service-based staffing business used by Fortune 1000 companies, our CRM system is among the most important tools we use because our many contractors use it to log time and create invoices.
It also acts as an accounting tool to ensure accurate time entry and billing. As a result, continual and reliable access to the application and its associated data is essential to ensure the organization runs smoothly. Effective disaster recovery (DR), therefore, has consistently been top-of-mind because any downtime is inconvenient and costly.
While our legacy DR system was functioning, we were experiencing a range of challenges with the potential to negatively impact overall operations. In particular, our system lacked resilience and constantly needed troubleshooting, updating, and suffered from lengthy recovery times.
If we continued with our existing solution, it would have required extensive investment to upgrade our hardware, including an increase in facility costs. Addressing these issues created an opportunity to make a positive shift in our approach and led us to choose Zerto as our technology partner.
To ensure Zerto was the best fit for our needs, we ran a proof of concept and were immediately drawn to the quick and easy setup, which required no network configuration and featured simple integration. By pairing Zerto with Azure, where we already had a large footprint, we were able to leverage Microsoft Azure for DR and valued the scalability, reliability, and cost-efficiency it provided.
Together, we deployed a seamless DR solution to meet the demand of our business and IT environments that was cost-effective and efficient. Zerto immediately migrated all of our environments from the main data center to a new data center in an adjacent city with minimum downtime.
In addition, we leveraged Zerto for Azure’s region-to-region DR. Using a fully automated process, we easily replicated data to and from the different sites with low recovery point objectives and low recovery time objectives while saving money. These industry-leading objectives reduced the hassle of constant troubleshooting and lengthy failover processes, giving the global workforce top-shelf DR that saves both time and money.
As a result, we have cut costs by 50% by using Zerto for DR in our new data centers. Furthermore, the timeframe to run failover tests is now 15-20% faster in comparison to our previous setup and our failover process has gone from four hours to four minutes.
Working with Zerto on this project was a great choice that has paid off for our organization. We’ve benefited from not only a cost perspective, but from a flexibility, scalability, and reliability perspective as well.
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