ACS, a division of Altron and a provider of electronic transaction solutions to companies across Africa, has implemented a disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) solution with VMware vCloud Availability to improve its DR capabilities and better serve customers across the continent.

The company was supported by local Cloud Service Provider (CSP) on the VMware Cloud Provider Programme, Routed.

“ACS formed the CyberTech business unit to meet the growing cyber security needs of its customers. However, it was not technically or economically feasible to build a data centre and cloud environment to exclusively focus on DR,” says Mira Andric, manager of operations and delivery at ACS.

The ACS technical teams required a self-service solution that could be implemented to recover systems on-demand without having to file tickets and wait for responses.

Given how closely Routed aligned to the ACS business and technical requirements, it made sense to partner with the service provider who could integrate with the existing VMware environment and deliver the level of proactivity ACS needed at an attractive price point.

“The workloads we run are massive. Routed provides the infrastructure and a self-managed portal that our engineers can log in to for full visibility. We also have direct access to their senior engineers, and the system interoperability between their VMware vCloud Director and our VMware vCloud Director is completely seamless,” says Andric.

As the new system is hardware agnostic, ACS is no longer locked into buying the same storage devices and hardware at each refresh cycle. Within two weeks, ACS migrated more than 30TB of backup data to the Routed cloud while the full project was completed within three months.

“Availability is critical to the success of our operation. But our systems also need to perform accurately and efficiently with no down time. We honour our commitment to our customers and strive to provide them with the best possible service and give them peace of mind where data security comes into play.”

ACS can now actively monitor potential security breaches and act accordingly. The DRaaS offering is user-friendly, completely scalable, and provides ACS with the flexibility needed to adapt to any customer environment.

“The biggest benefit for us is that we have a partner, in Routed, looking at implementing a common layer of storage-for-storage replication and are open to collaborating with us on all of our future systems. And because they run VMware this is so much easier,” concludes Andric.

Category: Success Stories

Tags: ACS, Altron, cloud, Cyber Security, Routed, vmware