Wasabi Improves Data Recovery Protection for an Electrical Consulting Firm

Businesses that support external organizations have stringent requirements for data access, integrity, performance, and disaster recovery, especially when those clients are in the public sector. Those additional needs add complexity and cost to any project. However, Wasabi has eased those challenges for one electrical consulting firm in the Midwest – and made the company’s data protection far more affordable. 

The Midwestern electrical engineering consulting firm provides expert engineering and consulting services for the energy market. “For a handful of our clients in the energy sector, that puts us under the North American Electric Reliability Corporation Critical Infrastructure Protection (NERC CIP) federal guidelines,” explained the company’s IT manager. The electrical services firm must comply with the NERC CIP reliability and operations requirements – including a disaster recovery plan. 

Initially, the organization’s infrastructure consisted of on-prem SAN storage, using Veeam for backup. However, the company moved its offsite backup to a hosted location and into object-based storage at Wasabi. “We have immutability in the Wasabi cloud,” said their IT Manager. “And we are also syncing those policies with Veeam.” 

The consulting company searched for alternatives when it could not resolve latency and throughput problems with another provider. Making matters worse, that old provider’s customer service was unresponsive. It took six months to get the electrical company’s data in order, and then intermittently, the provider would make database configuration changes in its Veeam backup copies without notice. “And then, of course, our jobs would start failing,” said the IT manager. “We’d have to call and open a ticket, wait a few days for them to respond, and finally get the right keys to get everything moved or working again.” 

Even more irritating, the cost was astronomical. 

Getting a charge from saving money 

Bosses are impressed when you save $44,000 per year.

And that’s what this IT manager did by switching to Wasabi. 

“That was a big chunk of money we saved,” their IT Manager said. “As a result, we could afford to spend that money on other projects.” Unsurprisingly, company management was impressed. 

In actuality, $44,000 was the minimum amount of money the electrical contracting company saved. That’s just the cost of storage.  

The consulting company primarily needs a cloud storage provider for disaster recovery, implying he’s not moving much data back and forth. “If we were to use a solution like Azure or Amazon, I know it would be pretty extensive,” the IT manager mused, “We’ll probably fill up half of our reserved instance, perhaps a little more. The amount of data influx would be quite big for the data ingestion.” 

Should disaster occur, though, it’d be a different story. The data would need to be restored in a stressful situation, and it might otherwise have cost a lot to get it back. The IT manager estimated that it would probably cost tens of thousands of dollars.