Data Canopy engaged with a large financial services provider who initially requested a quote for two cabinets of colocated data center hosting. Their on-premise data center had leaking air conditioning units and their IT team was under tremendous pressure to find a suitable environment for critical infrastructure. As part of Data Canopy’s initial discussions and discovery process, the following was uncovered in addition to the pressing data center hosting challenges:

• Aging hardware
• Ad-hoc network architecture
• Out-of-date applications and operating systems
• Growing security concerns

The internal IT team recognized the need to modernize and evolve the management and maintenance of core infrastructure and had an eye toward a longer-term virtualization strategy projected to span the next five years. Data Canopy’s team identified several opportunities to accelerate that timeline and consulted with the financial services provider to propose an alternative roadmap that rapidly realised business benefit while staying within their solution requirements and budget constraints.

SOLUTION

Data Canopy brought in experts in network architecture, data center infrastructure, cloud computing, storage, and cyber security to consult on the company’s current environment. The financial services provider was sensitive to excessive capital expenditures, so Data Canopy proposed an op-ex model for the chosen solution. The company had strict uptime and security requirements to ensure member data was secured and regulatory requirements were maintained. In order to guarantee the security and uptime needs were met, Data Canopy developed a strategy to migrate infrastructure to a virtualized environment hosted in a Tier III facility with a geographically redundant disaster recovery solution, with a guaranteed sub-one-hour Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

All development and member data updates are replicated and secure in a geographically diverse virtual disaster recovery environment, underpinned with daily incremental backups. To support the remaining physical infrastructure, Data Canopy migrated the servers to its virtual environment in a Tier III data center facility. The migration strategy and plan was carefully orchestrated with the internal IT team to keep downtime to an absolute minimum and ensure no data was lost in the process. Following the successful migration and modernization, threedays of training were held to help support the company’s staff with the transition.

In order to address the company’s cyber security concerns, Data Canopy leveraged the Phalanx Trident solution. This solution monitored the network for rogue devices, unauthorized access, firewall compliance, and ransomware or malware attacks. Shortly after installation, the company had an incident where a rogue device was detected on the network, isolated, and impact was limited and remediated. The proposed solution would not only resolve immediate needs to ensure the security and availability of their physical infrastructure, but also provide a robust and redundant virtualized environment for 85% of the client environment. As a result of Data Canopy’s solution, the company was able to leapfrog its timeline for modernization, streamlining management, guaranteeing uptime and backup, and stabilizing the entire infrastructure to better serve its members.

RESULTS

The client projected their IT infrastructure costs to be £680,000 per year. Data Canopy’s solution resulted in coming in under their projected cost at £244,000, or £20,400 per month. A significant cost savings to the client. As a result of Data Canopy solution, the company was able to leapfrog its timeline for modernization, streamlining management, guaranteeing uptime and backup, and stabilizing the entire infrastructure to better serve its members.