“The major difference between MSP360 Managed Backup and other service providers is the ease of setup, good customer follow up and support” -- Rosemary Kande, CGIAR
Background
The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is a massive global organization comprising 15 centers globally with more than 10,000 agricultural scientists having operations in 96 countries. The Nairobi Chapter of the organization controls research over a vast swath of land that comprises a large number of countries in the region.
CGIAR Nairobi also provides services to the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). The organization services about 150 large customers. These get services from a very large number of scientists who divide their time between the field and office locations.
Business Challenge
The organization uses about 30 backend servers to store research proceedings and results. With the scientists forever traveling between field and office, they were moving in and out of the company intranet.
With nearly 40TB of data being stored internally, backup was a major issue. Un-backed up data of many researchers was lost when computers got stolen or damaged. Valuable research material was at risk.
Backup in the organization was not being handled as a comprehensive activity. Some offices were backing up data manually, others were leaving it to users to manage their data. This resulted in a situation where data losses were significant.
Solution
After considerable research, the organization decided to try out the MSP360 Managed Backup solution. CGIAR was impressed by the easy to use cloud storage capability offered by MSP360 and aсquired more than 1200 licenses.
The MSP360 backup solution was very user-friendly and it could run on all devices that the researchers were using. This automated the backup process and ensured that data backup could be performed even from field locations.
The solution was very simple to use and once it was set up it did not require any additional work by the scientists. The workload on the IT staff was also reduced considerably, freeing them to perform other tasks.
What particularly impressed CGIAR was the quality of support MSP360 provided and the ease of backup. Implementing the solution was simple. Reporting features were very easy to use.
Conclusion
With the MSP360 Managed Backup solution in place, CGIAR has achieved an important goal of ensuring valuable research data is backed up all the time whether the researcher is in the field on in the office.
The solution did not require the purchase of any additional hardware. The MSP360 Managed Backup client was loaded and set up to backup data on Amazon cloud storage.
CGIAR did not have to make any upfront purchase of storage capacity. Amazon allows them to increase storage on demand, costs are minimal and data security is far better with encryption and strong passwords being implemented.
- Cross-platform backup and recovery
- Flexible licensing
- Bring-your-own storage approach
