Alex Smith |
Global steel manufacturer Troax has been producing mesh panel solutions to keep its customers safe for over 65 years. The Swedish company now has production facilities on five sites around the world, as well as sales offices in over 40 countries. Comprehensive backup and restore capabilities across all these facilities – hosted both on-premises and in the cloud – are essential for compliance and risk management, especially in light of growing cyber threats.
Previously, Troax used managed service offerings, which, while useful, led to a loss of control and increased complexity because it was working with multiple service providers across different geographic regions.
“My goal was to take control of our backups worldwide, so we know they work, and we have a similar system everywhere,” says Anders Weijland, system administrator for Troax. “I was most worried about ransomware and accidental user deletion, but also phishing attacks if threat actors were able to get hold of an important mailbox and we needed to restore it. Having backups in place helps me to sleep at night.”
Barracuda’s Backup products offered Weijland the chance to take back control at a low cost, with unlimited capacity at a single price. In the end, he chose five appliances, one for each production facility where on-premises servers are needed to mitigate cloud-based outages. This was complemented by a Cloud-to-Cloud Backup solution for the company’s Microsoft 365 environment, allowing admins to restore Microsoft Teams, Exchange, Sharepoint, OneDrive and OneNote with a high degree of granularity.
Troax has established its backups using a best practice 3-2-1 approach with three copies of data, two of which are stored on-site on different media and the other stored offline.
“So far it’s gone pretty well,” says Weijland. “We bought professional services with Barracuda, so the company helped to implement the first boxes. But then I got to learn how simple it was and just did the rest myself.”
Weijland was surprised at how easy the appliances were to get up and running, especially in connecting to the company’s Hyper-V environment. He estimates that the five-strong IT team could be saving as many as eight hours per month with Barracuda compared to when they were using the previous product. He also sees the partnership paying dividends going forward.
“I met with a senior project manager recently and he shared an exciting roadmap of new features,” he says. “It was a nice gesture from Barracuda to know what’s coming up which we can use, and I also shared examples of features I’d like to see.”
This article was originally published in the Winter 2022 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.