Lyco Direct.
Retailer Lyco Direct was established in 1995 and has grown to become the UK’s premier lighting company. It sells over 4,500 lighting products, for commercial and domestic use, within the EU and is currently planning an expansion to a second warehouse. The company differentiates itself by providing the latest products from around the world at competitive prices, coupled with award-winning customer service.
Award winning cloud services
Track record of successful
cloud services delivery
ISO accreditation and
expertise in managing
security processes
Project Overview.
As a managed services customer of Kalamazoo IT since 2009, Lyco had built up a significant amount of trust in its IT partner. Rapid expansion, increasing stock and product lines, and a growing customer base contributed to an exponential growth in business data. Lyco turned to Kalamazoo when a solution was required to store this increased amount of data, both on-site and off-site.
Protecting the data as well as having confidence in the ability to recover data in a timely fashion was a key business objective, as was the need to provide a constant online service to customers. By securely locating data across multiple sites, the business could continue to run regardless of circumstances. In any disaster situation, customer-facing and internal systems, applications and data needed to be recoverable in a secure alternate environment.
Lyco required a solution that allowed data to be vaulted securely over the internet to a third-party location that met and/or exceeded Lyco’s due diligence and privacy requirements, as well as provided an appliance on-site for rapid local recovery and 24/7 support with a one-hour response time. The company also targeted a reduction in recovery times from less than eight hours to less than two hours over a stable secure connection, significantly minimising the potential risk of data loss, as well as operational downtime.
The Challenge.
Although an existing backup solution and USB disks had served Lyco well previously, the IT team was not confident that the solution in place was backing up business critical systems correctly and consistently. The inability to back up data to a secure third-party location was leaving the retailer at risk, and there were constant service dropouts due to a poor connection between Lyco and the existing data storage facility. In spite of a recovery time reduction to five hours with the existing solution, Lyco wanted the ability to recover data within one hour or less.
The Solution.
Kalamazoo IT provided Lyco with a robust recovery solution for any disaster situation through the implementation of a hybrid DRaaS solution.
Our DRaaS offered a fully managed cloud solution that enabled Lyco to replicate data to an off-site location. Our on-site, local appliance, provided a comprehensive on-site disaster recovery platform that created a secure virtual environment, giving Lyco quick and easy access to servers as necessary.
Kalamazoo IT ensured that the correct IT and networking infrastructure, documentation, procedures and processes were in place.
Our Hybrid DRaaS provided data deduplication and encryption in transit and at rest, so storage space was not wasted on duplicated data or transferred in an insecure manner. It also reduced the risk of data loss and enabled rapid data vaulting and recovery from any location with a suitable secure internet connection. Vaults are fully automated, and Lyco is now able to quickly restore its IT systems onto standby servers.
Data vaults are now securely and consistently stored off-site, and there is no need for Lyco to use an external hard drive or USBs and remove them off-site as an additional backup method. As Kalamazoo IT provided a fully managed service, restoration of data and monitoring of the vaulting jobs are automatically in place, with the Kalamazoo team ready to assist regardless of whether the situation is a minor vaulting failure or full disaster scenario.
For on-site storage, the Hybrid DRaaS provided Lyco with peace of mind.
Benefits.
“Now that we have on-site and remote backup, we are confident that our data can be recovered quickly, while our IT team can focus on core business and strategic projects. Kalamazoo IT really is helping us to keep the lights on 24/7 – they managed the whole process, they understand our business requirements and ensured these were met.”