Aller Media Selects Cohesity for Secondary Data Solution with Greater Efficiency

Challenges

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 centralize its on-premises data into a single datacenter 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.

Aller Media looked for the following requirements in a secondary data storage solution:

• Seamless integration with the cloud for long-term data archival and retention
• Easy-to-manage solution to reduce administrative burden
• Unified solution for simplified management to reduce data fragmentation
• Consolidated platform to centralize on-prem and cloud storage into single datacenter

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. 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%.”

– Daniel Kristensen, Operations Manager