Community Housing Provider Home In Place Maximizes Value and Compliance with Wasabi and Veeam Solution

One of Australia's leading not-for-profit community housing providers, Home in Place, faced the challenge of securely storing and backing up its critical data while meeting strict government compliance requirements. With a limited budget and a growing need for a robust, cost-effective solution, the organization turned to Wasabi and Veeam to safeguard their data and maintain compliance without breaking the bank.

Challenge: meeting government compliance and balancing cost

As a registered organization with the New South Wales government, the community housing provider needed to meet strict statutory requirements for data recovery, including retaining their data for up to seven years. This compliance extended to their Office 365 data, which stored crucial emails, contracts, and other important documents. Moreover, they were required to ensure that this data was protected against accidental deletion, corruption, or malicious activity, placing an additional burden on their IT infrastructure and resources.

The organization's limited budget compounded these challenges. They sought a solution that could provide excellent performance, seamless integration, and a cost-effective price point. Additionally, they needed a solution to accommodate their data restoration needs without incurring egress fees, as they performed weekly data restores for testing purposes. These tests were crucial to verify the integrity of their backup solution and ensure they could recover data promptly in case of any incidents.

“We're a not-for-profit, so we are looking for value. We want to maximize the money that we do have for technical solutions,” said Kent Chalmers, Group Chief Technology Officer at Home in Place.

The challenge was finding an affordable solution that met their compliance requirements without compromising performance or functionality. This would allow them to allocate more funds towards their core mission of providing affordable housing to the community, rather than spending a significant portion of their budget on IT infrastructure.

Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage: cost-effective, secure, and compliant

To address their challenges, the community housing provider turned to Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. Wasabi provided an affordable, high-performance, and scalable solution that met their data storage and compliance requirements. Wasabi's integration with Veeam, a leading backup and replication solution, enabled seamless data protection and object immutability, further enhancing the organization's data security.

“We essentially allow, or we have the container set up in Wasabi to allow Veeam to do the object locking,” said Chalmers. “As far as I understand it, Veeam is turning on the object locking in the Wasabi object storage.”

The organization appreciated Wasabi's no-egress-fee policy, which made their weekly data restores more cost-effective. Additionally, Wasabi's ease of use and straightforward setup allowed them to streamline their backup processes and minimize the need for extensive technical support.

By choosing Wasabi, the organization found a flexible and cost-effective solution that not only met their compliance requirements but also integrated seamlessly with their existing IT infrastructure. This partnership enabled them to focus on their core mission while confidently entrusting their data protection and storage needs to Wasabi and Veeam.

Results: significant cost savings and enhanced data protection

By adopting Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage, the community housing provider experienced significant cost savings compared to other storage solutions in the market. As a not-for-profit organization, maximizing its resources was crucial, and Wasabi’s competitive pricing allowed them to do just that without compromising on quality or performance.

“Wasabi costs significantly less than other solutions, but the service and the product have not been reflective of the low cost. It’s a high-quality product, a high-quality solution for us, and it’s worked seamlessly,” said Chalmers.

The no-egress-fee policy made a considerable impact on their overall costs, especially given their need for weekly restores. Moreover, the combination of Wasabi’s storage solution and Veeam’s backup capabilities provided them with robust data protection and compliance assurance, enabling them to meet their seven-year retention requirement mandated by government policies.

As a result, the organization gained peace of mind knowing that its critical data, including emails, contracts, and policies, was securely stored and easily recoverable. This increased confidence in their data management allowed them to focus on their mission of providing affordable, inclusive community housing.

What’s next: continued growth and expanding use cases

With Wasabi proving to be a reliable, cost-effective, and high-performance storage solution, Home in Place is exploring new ways to leverage it in the future. They are using Wasabi for their Office 365 backups and considering integrating it with their Microsoft Azure deployments.

As they continue to expand their presence in the Azure space, the IT team at Home in Place remains confident that Wasabi will continue to meet their growing data storage and protection needs as they expand their services and offerings within the community housing sector.