Challenge
A downturn in the oil and gas industry put pressure on this transportation provider’s bottom line and forced them to examine how they were spending scarce resources on their critical IT infrastructure.
This client has been doing business with OnX for the past several years, primarily in a “self-serve” manner that was not very efficient or an effective use of their capital. In essence, their existing Disaster Recovery environment was comprised of dedicated hardware and colocation, which meant their internal IT resources had to carry the full burden of risk in managing the environment as well as account for the added expense of renting space at an offpremise data center.
Since their previous solution was dependent on dedicated hardware and rented space for hosting their data, the cost model was fixed with little flexibility. The customer was going to pull Disaster Recovery entirely in house if the OnX teams were unable to present a creative, cost-efficient solution.
Solution
Thankfully, the cloud is a game-changer when it comes to data protection and disaster recovery and presented the opportunity to move to a utility “consumption-based model” at a price point that was much more attractive.
OnX provided the client with a fully managed, success-based Disaster Recovery service that leverages Zerto as the replication software and uses the Azure public cloud platform as the destination. Moving to a fully managed model at a lower price point means that the client is buying an outcome in which OnX owns the responsibility to create the recovery documentation, provide a test twice a year, and deliver a letter of test performance showing success.
Results
OnX carries the burden of responsibility to create the recovery documentation showing successful recovery steps of the clients environment. OnX Managed DR services allowed their internal IT staff to focus on mission-critical initiatives rather than managing risks associated with their legacy infrastructure. In leveraging Microsoft’s public cloud platform and providing a managed, cloud-based Disaster Recovery solution, OnX was able to increase flexibility, scalability, and efficiency for this transportation providers IT operations. OnX helped them move from a Capital Expenditure to an Operational Expenditure cost model to reduce the financial burden involved in maintaining their inflexible hardware and eliminated their monthly colocation fees.