Ensono is a managed services provider that helps enterprises harness the power of hybrid IT, from mainframe to cloud, to accelerate their digital transformations while keeping their businesses running. The company manages complex business landscapes for clients including FTSE 500 businesses. Operating in a number of locations worldwide, including the UK, US and India, they manage 30,000+ servers.
Ensono is focused on both delivering clients’ IT needs today and ensuring that they are ready to meet the challenges of the future. Businesses are keen to use the flexibility, speed and scale of the cloud, but equally want to know that their data is safe, secure and backed up. Reliability is one of Ensono’s key values driving significant investment in award-winning governance platforms and tools.
AWS with added assurance
With over 15 years of experience in delivering cloud solutions, Ensono is a certified AWS managed service provider and manages over 1,000 instances on the AWS platform. However, AWS does not offer a complete backup framework for EC2 and the native technology is time consuming to implement and difficult to scale. This makes backing up client systems a challenge.
Without a native AWS backup solution, the Ensono team faced the prospect of writing their own scripts for scheduling and securing snapshots, dedicating significant time and resources to ensure that client systems were reliably backed up. Phil Jaquenoud, Director of Engineering and Operations, Hyperscale Cloud at Ensono, said:
“Homegrown scripts can do a job but, even if you spend lots of time, it’s difficult to be absolutely sure that everything is protected. This simply wouldn’t be sustainable at the enterprise scale, particularly as we continue to grow our AWS business.”
Ensono needed a backup solution that would enable them to offer reliable backups to their clients and that would meet or exceed their SLAs without causing a drain on internal resources.
A tailor-made solution built to scale
In early 2015, Ensono chose to implement N2WS Backup & Recovery a solution built specifically for AWS, for data backup and recovery.
“Getting up and running was really straightforward and N2WS definitely does what it says on the tin. We really appreciated having a solution that has been custom-built for AWS, rather than morphed from a previous product.”
Ensono uses N2WS to protect a whole range of applications for their clients, including SAP, Linux, SharePoint, client-written and cloud-based applications. The team has particularly benefitted from the simplicity of the tagging system.
As long as data is tagged with the right policy, it will be backed up, without any further input or administrative oversight from the team. N2WS also highlights any human error in the tagging process, reducing the chance of any issue occurring. N2WS is highly reliable, with Ensono regularly achieving 100% backup success across all clients every month.
Recovery within minutes
With N2WS, Ensono can meet clients’ demands to balance agility and innovation with solid reliability. Ensono is able to deploy new client solutions and environments very quickly, implementing new solutions in days, rather than weeks. As a result, the company can deliver innovation at speed, a key driving force behind its clients’ adoption of the cloud.
“Being agile is critical for businesses today and the #1 reason we see clients adopting public cloud. But that has to be balanced with confidence that your systems are completely recoverable, at speed. Using N2WS has enabled us to meet our clients’ IT needs and continue to grow as a business.”
With N2WS, data recovery can be completed quickly when needed. Snapshot backups are delivered as part of the SLA for AWS, with the RTO (recovery time objective) often set at just a couple of hours.
