East Thames housing association ‘cloud first’ with iland
Disaster-recovery-as-a-service using Zerto technology is helping association overcome compliance problems
The East Thames housing association has deployed iland’s disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) offering to increase organisational digitisation, help achieve compliance and ensure business continuity, as part of its “cloud first” strategy.
One of the largest providers of affordable housing in east London and Essex, East Thames manages almost 15,000 homes, builds new homes, provides care and support services and offers employment and training programmes to local people.
The association’s incumbent DR solution had “very high” operational costs and would require “significant capital investments” to continue using it at the organisation, said East Thames. Moreover, the existing DR solution did not enable East Thames to prove its reliability to satisfy audit requirements.
East Thames chose iland DRaaS, which uses technology from Zerto, for its “reliability, security, speed and ease of testing”.
“External auditors have been impressed with the ease of testing and recovery time objectives (RTOs) achievable with the iland DRaaS solution and have remarked that it’s better than what they’ve witnessed in the private sector,” said Paul Clark, head of service operations at East Thames.
“Our DR capability had been listed as a risk item by auditors a year ago – that’s not the case anymore. This has been a great introduction to cloud for East Thames, and has given us the confidence to adopt more cloud use cases in the future.”
“Across industry sectors, we see organisations struggling to address ever-evolving compliance challenges as part of their day-to-day operations,” said David Rushton, EMEA channel manager, Zerto. “These issues only add to the complexity of today’s data centre operations and have triggered IT leaders to focus on the pivotal role of disaster recovery software as well as efficiencies in compliant infrastructure options.”
He said: “This evolution is strongly evidenced by Zerto’s partner ecosystem, as cloud service providers such as iland continue to grow their customer bases and broaden their services to provide unprecedented flexibility, resilience and support.”
Analyst Gartner estimates the global DRaaS market will nearly triple in the next three years to a revenue point of $3.4 billion by 2019.
@AntonySavvas