One of the largest providers of affordable housing in east London and Essex, East Thames manages almost 15,000 homes, builds new homes, provides care and support services and
offers employment and training programmes to local people. Business Continuity is important to meet the needs of its customers, but also critical due to regulations from the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) of the UK Local Government and Business Continuity steering committee. As such, East Thames prioritised updating its disaster recovery plans as part of its transition to a ‘cloud first’ strategy.
The association’s incumbent DR solution had very high operational costs, was untested and would require significant capital investments to make it fit on an ongoing basis. Moreover, the existing DR solution did not enable East Thames to prove its reliability to satisfy audit requirements. After a thorough investigation of the cloud-based DR solutions available, East Thames chose iland DRaaS with Zerto for its reliability, security, speed and ease of testing.
“External auditors have been impressed with the ease of testing and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) achievable with the iland DRaaS solution and have remarked that it’s better than what they’ve witnessed in the private sector,” said Paul Clark, Head of Service Operations at East Thames. “Our DR capability had been listed as a risk item by auditors a year ago – that’s not the case anymore. This has been a great introduction to cloud for East Thames, and has given us the confidence to adopt more cloud use cases in the future.”
iland Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service with Zerto provides East Thames with tangible business benefits that include:
· Reduced recovery times from weeks to minutes - East Thames now achieves Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) in mere minutes – a huge improvement over the previous best case scenario which was measured in days and weeks.
· Simplified, non-invasive testing – Using iland’s management console with automated failover and failback, East Thames executes tests on-demand, anytime with no affect to production workloads. Regular testing on a much reduced time scale has given the IT team the assurance they need to trust their DR plans and address audit requirements.
· Agile operations in hybrid environment - With iland co-location services and carrier-neutral data centres, East Thames is able to leverage stretched Layer 2 VLAN technology to maintain the same network addressing scheme on-premises and in the iland cloud. “We can failover a single VM in a production environment with no scripts or configuration changes required. We can do partial failovers very easily and operate in a truly hybrid environment,” said Clark.
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· Proven security and compliance - East Thames needed to show its Group Risk and Audit committee that cloud security and data sovereignty requirements could be met by the new DR solution. Failed over applications are monitored by the iland advanced security settings to ensure ongoing compliance. Further, iland as well as its data centres in London and Manchester are ISO 27001 certified.
· Significant cost savings - East Thames is able to achieve cost efficiencies by reserving compute space in the iland cloud and quickly dialing up additional capacity only when required. The association has also cut costs by eliminating the capital investment required by the legacy DR infrastructure.
"Across industry sectors, we see organisations struggling to address ever-evolving compliance challenges as part of their day-to-day operations,” said David Rushton, EMEA Channel Manager, Zerto. “These issues only add to the complexity of today’s data center operations and have triggered IT leaders to focus on the pivotal role of disaster recovery software as well as efficiencies in compliant infrastructure options. This evolution is strongly evidenced by Zerto’s partner ecosystem, as cloud service providers such as iland continue to grow their customer bases and broaden their services to provide unprecedented flexibility, resilience and support.”
