Aller Media selects Cohesity for greater efficiency and reduced OpEx

Founded in 1873, Aller Media is a Nordic magazine publisher, headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark. As a publisher of women’s lifestyle magazine, the company is responsible for the print of Elle, Cafe, Familie Journalen, Femina, Allers and Se og Hør, in four countries and employs 2,500 people across the Nordics. The company is mostly made up of journalists and creative designers, with a virtual IT team on hand.

The Challenge

As part of its digital transformation process, Aller Media began the procedure of moving its workloads to the cloud, and found it was struggling to consolidate its data storage and management. With a single IT team for multiple-country support, Aller Media wanted to centralise its on-premises data into a single datacentre for ease of access and management, as well as improve its backup restore strategy. As the company was already using cloud for storage media archiving, it also wanted to move to cloud for long term archiving and data restore. The existing solution had multiple backup systems, with many of them not running properly or at all, and many others needed a lot of day to day maintenance. “It also didn’t provide us with the logistical insight we needed as to whether our data was protected,” commented Daniel Kristensen, Operations Manager, Aller Media.

The existing secondary data storage system also presented a significant time challenge. The legacy software was unsupportive, and employees were forced to use a lot of manual labour to check if backups were running correctly, and then to fix any problems. A number of acquisitions meant the data burden was growing, and it became obvious that the system had to change.

“When it comes down to it, data and backup is an insurance policy,” continued Kristensen. “And as far as we were concerned, we didn’t have one. So, we were uninsured as far as data was concerned. We needed a solution, and we needed it to bring value to our business.” The uncertainties associated with the fragmented system were beginning to take its toll on the IT team who were demotivated at running the same checks and corrections every day. Aller Media needed a partner it could trust, and a service that was simple to use, and effortless to manage.

The Solution

After watching a product demo at a partner event, Aller Media contacted Cohesity and was quickly won over by Cohesity’s simple and user-friendly interface, out-of-the-box operability, advanced hyperconverged solution, and quick backups. “The onboarding team was trustworthy from the beginning,” said Kristensen. “We really felt like we were entering into a partnership and not just a simple customer contract. Cohesity demonstrated a thorough understanding of our business challenges and presented us with a simple and efficient way to solve those challenges together. The advantage of the Cohesity solution was that we could scale it up or down as needed, and the low OpEx costs were also very attractive.”

The Results

The product team were on hand to offer full support during the onboarding process, and to smooth out any difficulties. Installation took just a few hours with zero disruption to employees, ensuring minimal cost to the business. “The time savings took effect almost immediately,” commented Daniel. “Previously, we had to have employees manually ensure backups were running, correcting those that weren’t, and these processes could take hours – sometimes even days. Suddenly, we didn’t have to do that anymore. As a result of the Cohesity solution, not only did we not need to hire new staff to manage the old backup systems, it meant that our efficiency gains were the equivalent of 13%.”

Thanks to the new Cohesity solution, Aller Media’s IT team is running more efficiently than ever. “We’re planning to implement some advanced disaster recovery setups, which we were never able to do before. Thanks to Cohesity, we are confident that in the event of a system failure, breakdown or data loss, we would still be able to get our magazines out and still go out to print. We now have a platform that enables us to feel secure, on both a technical and process level. This is a priceless achievement and this is ultimately what’s most important to us.”

Since deploying Cohesity’s comprehensive backup solution, Aller Media’s Nordic IT team are free to focus on the digital transformation of the company and bring additional value to the business. The team can now run more efficiently, and its on-premise data is reliably backed up, and easily accessible. “We will certainly be considering extending the Cohesity solution to protect our services in the public cloud as well,” concluded Kristensen.

Key Benefits

• Single, intuitive platform to manage backup and recovery from one location
• Significant time savings reduce administration from days to just hours
• Efficiency savings across entire organization of 13% with lower OpEx
• Ability to use Cohesity for disaster recovery