The company
iFeu is the leading managed services provider (MSP) for the greater Barcelona area in Spain and has been supporting small to medium-sized businesses with datacentre strategies for more than two decades.
The iFeu Cloud team has worked with dozens of customers that are migrating critical workloads to AWS cloud, specializing in organizations with hybrid environments —who came from traditional on-prem setups and who want to grow without taking on the burdens of building additional physical infrastructure.
They focus their efforts on critical IT services with the goal of providing tailor-made solutions that deliver high quality, high availability, and high efficiency to their diverse customer base (including sectors like financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing).
Challenges of migrating customers to the cloud
The majority of iFeu’s customers run on VMware and are looking for hybrid solutions in order to expand. They want a way to continue their growth without incurring the costs of building and maintaining more physical infrastructure. And they want the speed, scalability, and flexibility offered by the public cloud.
They chose a hybrid approach for 3 reasons:
- Migrating everything to EC2 would be prohibitively expensive.
- Storage Gateways, while sufficient to connect VMware to AWS, are not robust
enough to support the entire infrastructure. - Most customers were already heavily invested in their on-prem hardware.
As iFeu Cloud’s customers moved workloads to AWS they trusted the iFeu team for direction on best practices for high availability, data sovereignty, and meeting the strict data compliance standards in Spain. Because of this, iFeu needed a tool that they could plug into their own environment to provide high availability and comprehensive data management to their customers.
With a diverse customer set, comes a diverse set of environments
The iFeu Cloud team supports 100+ AWS accounts with dozens of production EC2 instances hosted in 3 AWS regions. All of their customers use Amazon S3 for storage and some depend on Amazon RDS. To connect on-premises infrastructure they have implemented Amazon Storage Gateway, and all rely on customized Amazon Virtual Private Connections (VPC) to reduce data transfer costs.
The biggest challenge: orchestrating everything from a single console
They were concerned with depending on a SaaS backup solution to protect customer data. iFeu needed a tool to easily orchestrate and automate backup and recovery services—without moving data outside of their customers’ accounts. This was critical in order to comply with their customers regulatory and compliance mandates.
Seeking the best solution
iFeu Cloud was looking for an enterprise backup & disaster recovery solution for AWS workloads. They also required a single console that could be centrally managed from within their own environment, allowing them to support dozens of customers through a multi-tenant architecture.
“It’s important to be able to have backup of our AWS environment because we have a lot of configurations. And it’s important that we can manage our customer’s environments without touching their data.”
But cloud-native wasn’t enough
Initially, the iFeu cloud team tried native EBS snapshots for data volume backups because they preferred to leverage AWS-native technologies. But they quickly found that the native tools just weren’t enough. They needed something better to protect their customers from data loss and downtime —and something to backup VPC infrastructure.
“We were using EBS snapshots but it was impossible to manage all of our customers. We wanted something more. We wanted to protect the instances but, at the same time, we wanted to take advantage of the full capabilities of living in the cloud —including cross-account and cross region DR and VPC backup.”
iFeu Cloud found their solution in the AWS Marketplace. They chose the top-rated tool, N2WS Backup & Recovery, which was engineered to securely handle hundreds of AWS accounts from a single console.
Results
“It runs like clockwork.”
With N2WS in place to help deliver efficient multi-tenant data lifecycle management, the
iFeu cloud team saw some amazing results, almost immediately.
Reduced costs of compliance by up to 60% for their customers
- N2WS has shown that automating snapshot archival for long term retention can lower the costs of compliance by 60%.
- It was a major benefit in a very short timeframe. Because of strict compliance mandates in Spain, iFeu’s customers have data retention requirements and iFeu can use N2WS to automate data archival for storage cost savings.
Provides 100% availability for their customers’ AWS environments.
- The iFeu Cloud team was able to provide their customers with 100% availability of their AWS data —and near-zero RTO— with automated backups for EBS volumes, EC2 instances, and VPC configurations.
- Using N2WS meant iFeu was able to quickly and easily service their customers across 100+ AWS accounts from a single console —with multi-tenant architecture, self-service options, and comprehensive reporting and alerting. This saved hundreds of hours of management time.
