To Go Forward, Back Up! Backup Strategies from 8 Leading Asia-Pacific Companies

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In business today, the quality of a customer experience that a company provides often depends on technology. Even when a customer is face-to-face with a company employee, or interacting over the phone, it’s likely that the company employee is interacting with a computer application on the customer’s behalf.

As a result, there is greater pressure than ever on IT teams to keep corporate services and data available and resilient. In the 21^st century, companies are their technology. The trust that they earn from customers depends on the availability and reliability of services.

Backup and recovery have become more important than ever. On the other hand, because IT teams need more time to develop new technology services that keep businesses competitive, there is less time for routine tasks such as backup and recovery. Companies need to streamline backup and recovery to minimize costs and resources, yet also protect faster-growing volumes of data at higher service levels.

These goals seem contradictory. But a number of Asia Pacific companies have developed strategies that achieve them all. The companies spend less time and money on backup, and have more resources for innovation as a result. Eight of these companies share their backup and recovery strategies below.

1. To simplify, turn multiple locations into one domain

How do you protect 20 million customers and back up several hundred terabytes daily with near 100 percent success—and a backup team of just two people?

Shanghai Mobile installed a NetBackup appliance at each of its five sites and organized them into one backup domain, run from a single console. Backups now complete twice as fast, and a process that used to involve several dozen people now takes just two. Get the details here.

2. Replicate automatically, recover anywhere

No company wants to handle 600 to 800 backup tapes, or shoulder the risk involved in sending tapes off site for disaster recovery. Suning Commerce Group, China’s largest retailer, decided to move from tape-based to disk-based backup.

Using two NetBackup appliances, it can now back up file servers 25 times faster, save CN¥3 million (US$483,000) in tape costs, and automatically replicate only changed blocks of deduplicated data between two sites, enhancing disaster recovery while eliminating the risk of shipping tapes.

The two appliances replicate data and the associated backup catalog, which includes records listing the files that have been backed up and the media on which the files are stored. As a result, data is ready for fast recovery at any site.  Learn more here.

3. Use technology to beat the competition

How does a small ad agency transform legacy technology into capabilities that help crush the competition?  One key step is to reduce complexity. Perth, Australia-based Marketforce uses NetBackup to unify three platforms, reducing training and administration time, boosting backup success, and giving the IT team 200 more hours a year for innovation. That’s a big gain for a small IT staff.

It was all part of an impressive IT makeover from a Symantec Partner. The agency’s smart processes were cited by a major advertiser when it awarded its account to Marketforce over the competition. Get the details.

4. Be ready to recover granularly

New Zealand’s Mitre 10 understands the importance of good tools. It’s an independent home improvement chain with 100 stores, twice as many as its nearest competitor.

Mitre 10 tripled its backup speed by upgrading to Symantec Backup Exec 2014. But it’s the granular recovery and the resulting 100 percent recovery rate that are most important to the company’s backup administrator: “The ability to back up a virtual machine image as well as the files inside it—or restore an entire virtualized application or the granular data in it—that’s what makes Backup Exec 2014 far more compelling than its competitors,” says Paul Flatt, infrastructure and support manager at Mitre 10.

Mitre 10 has been able to reduce backup and recovery administration time by 400 hours per year, enabling the IT team to take on higher value projects. It has recently been able to reduce the disaster recovery time objective from days to hours. Get the details here.

5. Make many small gains add up to a big one

South Korea’s Hanwha General Insurance used a steady stream of improvements to increase its sales while winning awards for achieving great customer service for three years straight. One improvement was automating backup with Backup Exec 3600 appliances, using them to replicate data between locations.

Says Bang Seokjae, IT manager at Hanwha: “The Backup Exec 3600 appliances enable us to recover our servers twice as fast as we did before. We will achieve 100 percent payback in six months.”  Here are the details.

6. Revise the backup approach to triple the speed

Hitachi Consulting Software Services India Pvt Ltd. develops intellectual property for major clients, and taking care of client data is critical. The company wanted to speed its file-based backups, and chose a technology that eliminates the scan to determine file change percentages. Leveraging client-side deduplication, the approach synthetically constructs a full backup image with full recovery benefits in the time it takes to do an incremental.

What’s the overall gain?  Full file server backups now complete three times faster, in 6 hours instead of 18, and the network and the IT team have more bandwidth for more valuable projects. See the story here.

7. Recover up to 20 times faster

From its Hong Kong office, Michael Page International, a leading professional recruitment consultancy, is expanding fast and working hard to provision new offices across Asia.

Backup and recovery were a struggle until it adopted new technology that made recoveries up to 20 times faster: now it can restore 1.8 terabytes in 3-4 hours instead of the 3-4 days its prior solution required. Deduplication has enabled the company to keep five times more data on site, enabling email message recoveries in an hour that once took a day. Learn more here.

8. Reduce the cost of backup by 60-70 percent

In South Korea, ForceTEC Co. Ltd. manages global logistics as well as a number of other transportation-related businesses. The company wanted to simplify a complex backup environment, and chose an approach based on backup appliances.

Its new processes include snapshot backups that combine the speed of raw-partition backups with the ability to restore individual files and keep the file system mounted during backups. The result is a first-time-ever capability to do full backups of a vast file environment within backup windows.  In addition, time and space savings have reduced the total cost of backup operations by 60 to 70 percent. See the details here.

Many other businesses offer advice in this customer success finder on how to go forward by backing up more efficiently.