About the Customer

VUT in Vanderbijlpark is one of the largest residential Universities of Technology in South Africa, with about 15,000 students and 300 programmes.
While the university has embraced advanced digital solutions in a number of areas, it was advised last year that its backup and disaster recovery procedures were not aligned with best practice, and it, therefore, needed to be improved.

Background

VUT was backing up its transactional data to an on-campus environment with the risk of data loss.

However, the cost of replicating its entire production environment complete with enterprise licences could have been prohibitive.
David Ramasodi, VUT’s Executive Director of IT Services, says that in the past, the university depended on a cold standby approach, with
copies made overnight to an on-premise DR box as one of its DR solutions.

Adapt IT implemented near real-time backup solution hosted in a Tier Three data centre situated over 30km away, meeting all the auditors’ requirements for best practice backup and data recovery.

The Solution

Adapt IT implemented near real-time backup solution hosted in a Tier Three data centre situated over 30km away, meeting all the
auditors’ requirements for best practice backup and data recovery.

Adapt IT ensured that the cloud-based solution met VUT’s minimum requirements and saved on the cost of implementing extra hardware equivalent to the current production environment.

If it does become necessary to do a fail over to the DR site, the cloud infrastructure can be scaled to the equivalent of the production server, and VUT will only incur costs during the time they use it.

Adapt IT also supports backups dating back at least a year, to support forensic audits in the event of corruption or suspected fraud.

“When compliance became an issue, we assessed a number of alternative solutions. Adapt IT’s solution was selected primarily on affordability – at a fraction of the cost of other solutions. We are now aligned with best practice and the solution delivers DR with warm standby:
every time something happens on the server, it is transferred to the cloud server in milliseconds – so it’s close to real time,”  – says Ramasodi.

The Outcome

Ramasodi says the solution supports faster, easier testing, so easing pressure on his team.

“Crucially, we are now fully compliant, the auditors are happy, and we can sleep peacefully knowing that should there be any problems, the
core business won’t be affected.”