With offices in the UK, Ireland and Australasia, Bluestone is at the forefront of delivering innovative financial services to customers in a rapidly changing market that is subject to stringent compliance requirements. Facing aging infrastructure and expiring supplier contracts, the company is pushing toward a cloud-first IT strategy to stay ahead of evolving customer and regulatory demands. As part of the push, Bluestone turned to iland to implement a secure, cost-effective and reliable cloud-based IT disaster recovery solution.
The move not only reflects the growing trend toward DRaaS adoption, but also the increased focus on cloud security as companies aim to protect themselves against cyber threats, human error, natural disasters and other business threats while maintaining compliance. In a recent study conducted by Enterprise Management Associates on behalf of iland, 62 percent of the 669 IT decision makers and security experts surveyed reported they leverage Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service. On the whole, security and compliance features topped the list of priorities respondents consider when selecting a cloud provider.
“Our IT team runs lean and mean and we don’t want to build our own DR solution or hire a DR expert-–for us, that expert is iland,” said Krisztian Kenderesi, the head of Global IT Operations for Bluestone. “The iland DR solution reliably runs in the background. I know it works and I don’t have to worry about the infrastructure availability, compliance and security. Our usability and maintenance overhead for the iland DRaaS solution is basically zero—much less than the headaches of an on-premise DR solution.”
To assist in its search, Bluestone reached out to Behind Every Cloud (BEC), a specialised cloud consultancy group. BEC quickly identified several suitable DRaaS vendors, including iland, and performed a full evaluation and due diligence on each solution. The iland DRaaS solution scored strongly on all metrics in BEC's Clover Cloud Vendor Rating index due to its cost-effectiveness, aggressive recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs), advanced security features, management capabilities and the ability to meet industry compliance requirements.
Choosing iland Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service with Zerto provides Bluestone with tangible business benefits that include:
· Avoid downtime and simplify DR management – Bluestone can quickly recover from any IT incident, achieving recovery time objectives measured in minutes and recovery point objectives measured in seconds. The intuitive iland cloud management console enables Bluestone to execute failovers and view and manage DR resources, delivering all performance, security and costing information within a single interface. Further, the Bluestone team can perform full, non-intrusive testing of the DR solution on demand with no impact on operations via the console.
· Protect customer data with integrated advanced security – In the event of a failover, Bluestone’s workloads are protected against emerging IT threats with the unmatched advanced security native to iland’s DRaaS offering. Features include antivirus and malware detection, vulnerability scanning, whole disk encryption, SSL-VPN, intrusion detection and prevention, event logging, deep packet inspection and other advanced capabilities. The Bluestone team also accesses on-demand security reports at the touch of a button through the iland management console.
· Simplified industry compliance – In addition to Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) regulations, Bluestone must maintain the ISO 27001 standard which has clear requirements for considering security in a Disaster Recovery environment. “iland supports us with advanced security and compliance reporting that speeds up and simplifies our compliance processes.” Further, Bluestone has access to iland’s certified compliance professionals that can help interpret reports and develop plans, processes and strategies to address requirements.
· Reduce IT resiliency costs by 40 percent – With iland’s straightforward pricing model, Bluestone only pays for compute resources when it requires a failover. The company has achieved a reduction of 40 percent in the overall cost model of its DR solution.
