Recognised as an industry leader on both state and national levels, The Trans Group operates more than 1,200 vehicles to provide transportation services to hundreds of thousands of passengers annually. Its focus is to provide safe, reliable and cost effective bus services to schools and the community at large, which means the company requires reliable access to its real-time operational data 24x7.
Though the company’s data had been housed in multiple locations, IT leadership aimed to strengthen its disaster recovery strategy by implementing regional diversity between data centre locations. Similar to many companies seeking to improve business continuity capabilities, The Trans Group team began by investigating data backup technologies. However, upon evaluating the capabilities and cost efficiency of various solutions, the team selected iland’s DRaaS solution because it goes beyond backup, ensuring near-zero downtime, simplified management and expert support while also meeting strict budget requirements.
“iland enables us to manage our entire DR environment through its Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS) console, and we have live servers housing our data that we can communicate with – it’s the ultimate DR solution,” said Rob Dalton, director of IT at The Trans Group. “Failover is as simple as hitting a button and we’re up and running.”
iland’s DRaaS burst model of pricing means that The Trans Group is only charged for CPU and RAM on running VMs when a failover or test is performed, making the solution cost efficient.
“I know exactly what my DR bill will be each month and I can tweak services through the ECS console to manage costs,” said Dalton. “The iland cloud services team was amazing – they had us up and running over a weekend and nothing was too much trouble for them.”
With iland’s DRaaS with Zerto solution, The Trans Group has been able to:
· Strengthen its business continuity strategy by geographically dispersing data centre locations and achieving recovery point objectives measured in seconds
· Meet budget requirements with iland’s burst model pricing
· Optimise efficiency of its IT team using iland’s intuitive ECS console to manage and test DR
· Implement DRaaS solution within 48 hours
In the future, the Trans Group plans to provide mobile devices for safety team members on which they can record route, safety and compliance information and have this data replicated in real time to the iland cloud. Dalton sees opportunities to expand cloud usage and utilise the iland cloud for production applications in the future as well.
