The company
Comunet is a Managed Service Provider based in Adelaide, South Australia. For the past 25 years, Comunet has provided services and expertise in areas such as consulting and business strategy, cloud computing, app development, cybersecurity, and infrastructure services. Their customers range from state and national not-for-profits, small to medium business and local government. Comunet is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner.
The challenge
As a consulting partner, Comunet is involved in all aspects of their customers’ AWS deployments. Their mission is to drive positive impact within the local business community and help customers achieve their business goals.
Comunet’s customer base spans a range of industries, some of whom are doing life-saving work such as the Royal Flying Doctors. Each customer has different requirements, therefore Comunet knew they needed a tool to centralize and scale backup and recovery operations for Amazon Web Services (AWS).
“With a growing customer base spanning 300+ EC2 instances, 40 accounts and several regions, we wanted to implement a tool that is built for the cloud, rather than retrofit an existing solution. It’s vital to us that we can protect the different AWS services that our customers use every day – and in a cost-effective way.”
—Paul Shepherdson, Technical Consultant at Comunet
Comunet is responsible for protecting web applications, end-user booking systems, automated ordering systems, databases, and CRMs.
“Our challenge was to find a single tool to centralize and automate our processes so that the team spends less time on manual work. We were also looking for other ways to add value with services such as automated recovery testing and data lifecycle management.” Paul continued.
The solution
N2W runs directly within the AWS environment, which Comunet’s customers love as it means they don’t need to give a 3rd party access rights to fulfil their backup and DR needs.
Comunet has benefited from the intuitive console, speedy support, reporting and cross-account disaster recovery. Managing multiple customers is simple and they value their relationship with N2W.
“It was clear that the N2W team is committed to working with us in a partnership not just as a vendor. They’re happy to invest the time to understand what we are looking to achieve. N2W is willing to work through scenarios, listen to our suggestions and show us how best to achieve our goals.”
N2W also supports regulatory compliance for Comunet. A growing number of their customers have data sovereignty requirements. “One client has data in three continents and we can maintain their data sovereignty requirements easily with the help of AWS and N2W.”
Another area in which Comunet has been able to add value using N2W is through disaster recovery orchestration and testing. N2W Recovery Scenarios allows the team to set up and maintain a reliable, repeatable system to recover workloads.
The results
“Recovery Scenarios has greatly reduced the length of time and cost associated with doing a full DR test. The dry run option gives customers reassurance that their plan will work, if a crisis occurs – it also has the potential to reduce a lot of stress!”
By partnering with N2W, Comunet have streamlined their entire backup and recovery operations and can more efficiently manage each customer’s data protection needs.
Enterprise-level protection for critical customer workloads running on AWS
With the help of N2W, Comunet protects over 300 EC2 instances and 40 accounts across 5 regions. The team has reduced the RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO (recovery time objective) for key clients running large instances, while keeping storage costs in check.
Less time, money and manual work spent on complex disaster recovery plans
“By reducing the steps and the skills needed to recover an application or a complete site, in the event of a disaster, means we can confidently (and quickly) respond to any issue. This leads to increased satisfaction amongst our customer base.”
Significantly reduced storage costs for backups archived to cold storage
Comunet has leveraged N2W’s data lifecycle management capabilities to archive backups to Amazon S3 and Glacier. The team are able to provide cost-effective long-term storage, for customers that need to keep backups for compliance, without compromising retention.
Paul concludes, “N2W provides Comunet with a central platform to cater for all of our backup, recovery, DR and DR testing needs. We’re in a better position than ever to support our customers with their business continuity goals. With the help of N2W we can continue to innovate our offering and grow the business.”
