SISTIC reduces backup time and cost across its hybrid-cloud environment

SISTIC is Singapore’s leading online ticketing services company and one of the country’s top e-commerce sites. It works with event promoters to bring some of the largest global and local events to the public each year. The company has a team of over 50 developers and also sells a web-based ticketing solution called STiXCloud to third-party ticketing companies, event promoters, and venues in Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Macau.

The Challenge

Like most consumer-facing technology companies operating today, digital ticketing service and solution provider SISTIC was experiencing a dramatic proliferation of data within the organisation, along with the added complexities of backing up and securing its data. The company’s legacy backup product was sufficient when first deployed, but as the business grew, it quickly became highly inefficient. The IT team initially backed up data to tapes and then transferred the tapes to its off-site storage location. This added significant time to recover files. Each day this effort required, on average, two hours of a person’s time. Then, after data was sent to the off-site storage location, if SISTIC wanted to recall it, the organisation had to wait for someone to physically bring the data back.

Over the last decade, the company has evolved from an exclusively on-prem IT environment into an organisation that is using a combination of private and public cloud solutions in addition to managing three datacentre locations. While this type of hybrid cloud model is common among today’s enterprises, the IT team was struggling with the growing challenge of mass data fragmentation: where data was inefficiently stored in infrastructure silos across locations, making it difficult and costly to gain visibility into and manage data effectively. This problem would only get worse as data volumes increased.

With only a small team to manage its data infrastructure, Richard Lee, Head of IT Infrastructure and Service Delivery, explains that “the solution we had could be updated, but after testing we found that there were better, more modern solutions available in the marketplace. There is valuable data to be found in organisations and you need intelligent software to really manage it.”

The Solution

“We ultimately agreed that Cohesity was the right solution for us because it checked all the boxes of our evaluation criteria. I also learned that Cohesity offers very strong support after speaking to many other people about their experiences with similar products and solutions at industry events,” states Lee.

With Cohesity, SISTIC has been able to manage its data in a much more effective way. The team wanted a way to be able to view data across environments and easily manage backups from one dashboard. The team turned to Cohesity Helios, a SaaS-based management solution that provides simplified and unified data management—across both on-prem and cloud locations.

SISTIC also likes Cohesity’s cloud-native capabilities. For example, backing up Office 365 data was made simple. In addition, the team is using Cohesity’s long term archival capabilities to archive over 20 TB of files that – due to regulatory guidelines—the company is required to keep for five to seven years. The company also uses Cohesity’s DataPlatform as a scale-out NAS solution to manage internal file shares for users.

Other notable features for SISTIC were the fast search and anti-ransomware capabilities. Cohesity’s anti-ransomware offering enables organisations to deter, detect, and rapidly respond to a ransomware attack. Another key challenge for organisations can be auditing the number and size of files users are saving to shared filer drives. With the Cohesity Spotlight application, the IT team has detailed visibility into who is saving what files to the internal file share.

The Results

Today SISTIC has dramatically reduced its backup window by more than 50 percent and files can be recovered instantly from a single repository.

The IT team has decommissioned its legacy tape technology libraries and there is no longer any need to subscribe to off-site storage services, also eliminating the need for staff members to make daily visits to an off-prem data centre. This is one reason the company is able to save at least 60 human hours over a quarter – time that can be
spent increasing productivity in other areas.

With Cohesity, SISTIC can now encrypt backup data and send it to the cloud for archival to remain compliant and be prepared for yearly audits. The company expects to save an estimated S$50,000 in operating costs over two years.

Overall, Lee sees three top benefits of switching to Cohesity: better backup to help the team meet compliance requirements, tighter security, and the ability to effectively use and monetise the data. With the previous system, the company had to conduct extensive training with each employee. Cohesity was so simple to deploy and utilise, team members were able to easily use the software after only a few days.

With the help of Cohesity, SISTIC has simplified backup, consolidated its data into a centralised location, improved security, and strengthened overall data management—including across cloud environments.

Key Benefits

• Simplified data management within a hybrid cloud environment
• Cost savings of S$50,000 over the next two years
• Gains of 60 hours per quarter, returning nearly eight days of production
• Backup windows reduced by 50% with instant restore from a single repository
• Anti-ransomware protection to counter attacks and defend enterprise data