News

Irish Independent reports on how Savenet Solutions provide disaster recovery to financial firm, CACI

CACI is a payment-protection insurer distributing insurance solutions in 14 countries under the freedom of services structure – part of the French Credit Agricole Group. The company has 57 people, compromising eleven nationalities, working in Dublin.

Headquartered in Paris and Lille, Caci has three representative offices in Milan, Frankfurt and Madrid – all of which are dependent on the Irish IT infrastructure. CACI has implemented disaster recovery (DR) solutions and managed service solutions to reduce business risk, deliver high availability and be better prepared for DR.

Mary Ryan, IT manager at CACI, explains: “With representative offices in Milan, Frankfurt and Madrid, a corporate-wide disaster recovery/business continuity plan was required. We needed a solution in place so that if some kind of interruption or disaster occurred we could get back to work as quickly as possible."

CACI's managed service provider Trilogy Technologies which has provided ICT support to CACI for the past seven years, and operates as its trusted IT advisor, recommended Savenet Solutions as a DR provider.

Trilogy Technologies partnered with Savenet Solutions to set up a DR service, providing necessary security access and knowledge transfer to ensure the critical servers and data integrity were in place for CACI.

Trilogy Technologies continues to work with Savenet Solutions on an ongoing basis, advising on any updates or changes to the CACI environment to ensure these changes are replicated at the DR site.

Savenet Solutions worked with the company to integrate its cloud DR service, which gives remote access to clients’ programmes, servers and data. Savenet’s online backup software allows backup of all CACI’s servers on a daily basis to their virtual DR environment in a remote data centre using their existing internet connection. Savnet then rebuilds virtual servers to the same specification as CACI’s live servers. CACI can then access these virtual DR servers through the secure VPN connection in the event of a disaster. Savenet also installed on onsite business continuity appliance, which facilitates the fast restore of one or more servers due to a hardware failure offsite.

“We now have a real-time online replication with regard to our email and applications and this allows us to respond quickly in the event of any failures or disaster”, Ryan explains.

The next phase for CACI is to further virtualise its live environment which will give it added power in reduced space. As part of Savnet Solutions ongoing development of the DR service, the company plans to move CACI over to a more high-availability solution within the next three months. These solutions will reduce their recovery time from eight to twelve hours to two or three hours.

“Accessibility, reliability and availability of information is paramount to success in our business, The disaster recovery and managed services solutions has given us a highly flexible solution that we can easily grow when it is needed,” says Ryan.