No data wastage for Pikitup

Pikitup, the company charged with keeping the streets of Johannesburg free of rubbish may deal with waste by the mountain full. But says Pikitup CIO, GLYNIS LESLIE, it is by no means wasteful when dealing with its vital business data.
As the utility charged with keeping the streets clean inninner and outer Johannesburg, Pikitup may deal with waste on a substantialnscale, but there is no way that the organisation is wasteful with its vitalnbusiness data. Using Attix5 Pro, Pikitup’s Chief Information Officer, GlynisnLeslie, has established a comprehensive data backup policy that ensuresncompliance with the King III code of corporate governance.

“When I took the post of CIO in August 2010, I was concernednat the fact that our backup policy was too ad hoc and that we were exposed tonsubstantial risk due to the unstructured backup policies,” says Leslie. “Wenrequired users to write files to the servers and in essence this was not ansufficiently robust solution.”

Pikitup issued a tender for managed Internet Services andnthis was won by Internet Solutions (IS). “They looked at our operatingnenvironment and they recommended Attix5 Pro as a backup solution. At Pikitup,nwe have around 430 users and 8 servers that we need to back up and we needed ansolution that ensures that we have control over the protection of the data forneach of these users and servers, one that gives us control over what is happeningnat each data point,” says Leslie. “Our users are broadly distributed and somenare highly mobile and we need to protect every bit of data within ournorganisation.”

“I needed to be confident of the backup solution that we werenselecting as we had an incident about 3 years ago when we lost 70 workstationsnthrough a break-in and the loss of data was catastrophic. I made it my missionnto ensure that this never happened again and in May this year, we commenced thendeployment of Attix5, through IS. As with any business process change, we havenexperienced some challenges including getting access to- and configuring thensolution on- user’s Workstations.” What is vital to Pikitup is that the backupsnoccur without user intervention. “I like the fact that Attix5 Pro is largely anset-and-forget solution and that backups happen without the user even knowingnthat it is happening.”

Backing up their business data into the cloud via IS, givesnPikitup dual redundancy as IS backs up their datacentre to other IS datacentres.nThis allows for optimum data protection in the event of any substantialndisaster and ensures compliance with King III policies.

“We are educating our users on the benefits of the solutionnand ensuring that they understand that the solution is there for their ownnbenefit and protection. We use the Attix5 management console to monitor allnbackups at a granular level for all servers as well as for each and everyndesktop and laptop,” says Leslie. It is important to note that many of thenPikitup IT users back up from remote locations and sites removed from the HeadnOffice. The Attix5 Management Console gives Pikitup a snapshot of the progressnand status of all the backups, showing instantly which users have successfullynbacked up, but more importantly, which users and machines have not backed up,nallowing for rapid remedial action to be taken.

It is said that the true value of backups is only reallyndetermined in the ability to restore the data when necessary. “One of ourntechnicians recently had a hard drive crash on his workstation. All his datanwas backed up with Attix5 and we did a completely successful restore of hisndata and had him up and running in no time at all. We were extremely impressednwith the ease and the accuracy of the restoration and we are confident in thenway that Attix5 protects our data.”

Pikitup frequently runs test on their servers to ensure theirnability to restore their data. “We have portioned our backup servers and in allnthe restore tests that we have run, we have not experienced any failuresnwhatsoever,” concludes Leslie.

* Follow Gadget on Twitter on @gadgetza