For Bluestone, operating in the competitive and lightning-speed industry of financial services means the company’s IT team is constantly finding new ways of delivering services to customers. Bluestone leverages the iland Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service solution to protect essential IT systems and ensure they continue to delight customers with innovative financial services.
Business profile
With offices in the UK, Ireland and Australasia, Bluestone is at the forefront of delivering innovative financial services to customers in a rapidly changing market. Providing lending services, asset management and capital management to private and institutional investors, the passion for financial services that runs through the fast-growing company is matched by a passion for technology and how it can be used to exceed the expectations of their customers.
A need for secure, compliant DR identified
With legacy infrastructure, expiring supplier contracts and a push from the Bluestone chairman towards cloud-based applications, Krisztian Kenderesi, the head of Global IT Operations for Bluestone, turned his attention to finding a secure, cost-effective and reliable cloud-based disaster recovery solution. To assist in this search, he reached out to Behind Every Cloud (BEC), a specialized cloud consultancy group that helps companies achieve clarity, choice and control in a rapidly evolving UK IT cloud services market.
Behind Every Cloud quickly identified several suitable DRaaS vendors, including iland, and performed a full evaluation and due diligence on each solution. The iland DRaaS solution scored strongly on all metrics in BEC’s Clover Cloud Vendor Rating index due to its cost-effectiveness, aggressive recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs), advanced security features, management capabilities and the ability to meet stringent industry compliance requirements.
Industry compliance is a business imperative
While the Bluestone IT team is cloud-savvy, they are also very operationally risk-aware which is essential in an industry that is heavily regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). In addition to FCA regulations, Bluestone needs to maintain the ISO 27001 standard which has clear requirements for considering security in a Disaster Recovery environment. Kenderesi said.
Advanced security protects their customers
With their DR solutions running on the iland cloud with advanced security built-in, Bluestone has the assurance that whenever they need to failover, security features including vulnerability scanning, encryption, intrusion detection, anti-virus/anti-malware and more are protecting their virtual machines. On-demand security reports also are available to Kenderesi and his team at the touch of a button through the iland management console, which, along with expert guidance from the iland compliance professional services team, helps prove compliance to regulators.
Cost-effectiveness and DR testing drive results
Aside from the protection and peace of mind delivered by iland’s advanced security and compliance functionality, another important benefit for Bluestone is the cost effectiveness and simple pricing of the iland solution. Because they only pay for compute resources when they require a failover, Bluestone avoids wasting IT resources and has achieved a reduction of 40% in the overall cost model of their DR solution.
Kenderesi adds,
The intuitive iland cloud management console enables the Bluestone IT team to view and manage DR resources and have all the performance, security and costing information at their fingertips. And, they perform full, non-intrusive testing of the DR solution with no impact on their operations through the console.
Kenderesi sums up the innovative approach that Bluestone is taking to IT and Disaster Recovery,
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