Lakeside Process Controls

In 2016, Lakeside began its journey to the cloud when a huge power outage brought their on-premise infrastructure down. This outage refocused Lakeside’s IT team to start moving mission critical systems off premise.

The Company’s Goal

As Lakeside moved to the cloud, they insisted on a data protection solution that could provide their growing environment, including VMware and Microsoft 365, with immutable, cloud-based backup.

The Aha Moment

After an exhaustive search Lakeside finally found Clumio, a service that checked all their boxes but didn’t force them to make a painful compromise between price and backup confidence.

The Outcome

Clumio’s ability to air-gap backup data and secure it against loss was like no other vendor. And, on top of that, the flexibility, ease, and scalability of the service added up to a huge win for Lakeside.

Onward and Upward

Not only does Clumio address Lakeside’s immediate concerns around backup, but its long-term vision and product roadmap has IT leadership confident that, as Lakeside grows, its future needs will be covered.

The Business Challenge— Can’t Miss a Beat

For more than 65 years, Lakeside has been building and supporting mission critical automation systems for manufacturing plants and mines across the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Manitoba. It’s absolutely essential their customers’ production lines are working, and their plants stay open. Lakeside has maintenance and support SLAs with which they must comply. Downtime has huge risks and costs for Lakeside’s business.

According to Chris Blazejewicz, IT Manager, the role of IT at Lakeside is to ensure there are no business interruptions— minimal operational downtime and no loss of data. In 2016 however, the company got a wake-up call that changed their approach to technology. “We had a massive power outage, which knocked all of our on-premise systems offline,” explained Blazejewicz. “It was a moment of clarity, and we decided at that point it was time to push off premise and to the cloud.”

Technology Problem—The Need for Cloud Backup

Their first step into the cloud was moving to Microsoft 365, but at the time their backup and recovery for VMware was still stuck on premise. In an unpredictable world, Blazejewicz wanted assurance that the business‘s data and workloads were safely backed up to the cloud and could easily be recovered if disaster struck.

Furthermore, Blazejewicz was increasingly concerned about ransomware and its potential to disrupt business continuity. “As ransomware evolved and hackers began targeting not only businesses’ primary storage but also backups, I found myself having sleepless nights,” he said. “Ultimately, I wanted the ability to have our growing VMware environment, our Microsoft 365 instance, and everything else backed up to a secure location that is immutable, not only to outside risk but to accidental deletion.”

Finding an Answer—Checking All the Boxes with Clumio

The big thing for Blazejewicz was not only finding a cloud-based service that gave him confidence, but it also had to be at the right price. “We started looking at different technologies that gave us the ability to backup up to the cloud, but nothing was really satisfying,” he said. “As an engineering company, we have a lot of big data and the pricing models for the products we looked at were terribly complex. Not only were they difficult to understand, but ultimately they were very expensive.”

According to Blazejewicz, there is often a tradeoff between the right technology and the right price—sometimes you make that tradeoff and sometimes you don’t. When Lakeside came across Clumio, they finally found a backup solution that checked all their boxes and didn’t force them to make a painful compromise. “Clumio offered a unique way of doing backup, at a very different pricing structure that made sense to us. You didn’t need a decoding ring to figure it out.”

Equally as important, Clumio gave Lakeside the immutable data backup for which they were looking. “Clumio removed the direct connection between my production data and my backup,” stated Blazejewicz. Clumio’s ability to airgap the backup data and secure it against either outside attacks or accidental deletion was a huge win for Lakeside.

The Business Benefits

The first thing that excited Blazejewicz about the new Clumio service was the flexibility to set the business’s own policies and change how often backups occur. “A lot of other vendors in this space don’t even have that,” stated Blazejewicz. “So right off the bat I can adjust the quantities and the time of retention for Microsoft 365. I am not forced to do backup on their schedule. I can do it as frequently as I need to. This was a big improvement over the past.”

With their old product, Blazejewicz and his team were also stuck with the time-consuming and painful task of monitoring storage and trying to predict growth. “With Clumio all of that goes out the window,” he said. “There are no more warnings that my backup repository is 98% full and I have to go buy another 200 terabytes of storage. It is not a concern for me anymore. I just click it, set it, forget it, and it works.”

For Blazejewicz, Clumio’s ability to support VMware, Microsoft 365, and other data sources with a unified service is hugely valuable. “Having a single pane of glass vastly simplifies my backup management,” stated Blazejewicz. “I can’t count the number of consoles and windows I had to open daily. Having a single backup view is such a relief. And to be honest, because I get proactive notifications from Clumio on a regular basis, I have the confidence to not even bother with a daily viewing of the console. I know the Clumio solution will just work. I do not need to babysit it. It’s great to have that one place where everything lives, and everything is just there.”

Another key issue for Lakeside is data sovereignty. By storing their data in Canada, Clumio can meet the requirements of Lakeside customers. “It could become instantly critical next week,” said Blazejewicz. “One of our customers could insist that our data be stored in Canada. And now we can. No other vendor could offer us this capability. It was a huge win for us to future proof our backup.”

Clumio’s responsive and proactive support has also impressed Blazejewicz and his team. “We raised a question with Clumio about visibility to daily backups in the calendar view,” he explained. “It was awesome, because they listened to the feedback, they understood that the need existed, and they worked with us to address it as quickly as possible. And often they are ahead of us. They monitor and notice our backup issues before we are even aware of them.”

Ready for the Future

In the old way of managing on-prem backups, Lakeside was bogged down with tedious, manual tasks. Moving to Clumio has enabled Blazejewicz to free up his time to work on more strategic initiatives. He can now focus more on the future and on building his team’s skills and value to the business.

One of the things that caught Blazejewicz’s attention from the beginning was Clumio’s product roadmap. Not only was Clumio addressing Lakeside’s immediate needs for data protection but Clumio was also thinking ahead. “Clumio has been everything I hoped for,” stated Blazejewicz. “I’m not only pleased with what I have today but am confident that as the business grows and new challenges arise, such as increased need for regulatory compliance and data sovereignty, Clumio will be there to support Lakeside.”