L.K. Bennett selects Asigra Cloud Backup

Headquartered in London, L.K. Bennett is a luxury fashion brand defined by its British heritage. After using a tape-based backup solution for years, the company realized a change was necessary when its backup environment began suffering from increasing backup windows and failed data recoveries. The company sought to modernize its backup environment by transitioning to a cloud-based data recovery solution which included the Asigra Cloud Backup Connector Appliance -- provided by Backup Technology Limited (BTL). As a result, L.K. Bennett has eliminated the inefficiencies of tape backup to improve overall business uptime.

L.K. Bennett currently backs up 14 TB of production data in a very complex environment that involves a mixture of physical and virtual systems (Dell workstations and HP servers), and multiple connections from the company’s multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) across sites in London and the United States. As such, the company’s tape-based backup system required extensive management time. In addition to tape management and data recovery headaches, storing data onsite was an additional security concern which required IT management to move data offsite and out of Greater London.

Having been a customer of cloud backup disaster and recovery provider Backup Technology Limited (BTL) for the past five years, L.K. Bennett turned to BTL for an enhanced solution to its data protection challenges. With limited bandwidth, L.K. Bennett needed a WAN-optimized solution in order to meet its requirements. “We did our research to find a provider with market experience and a customer base to match,” said David Van Eck, Head of IT at L.K. Bennett. “That provider was BTL.”

L.K. Bennett modernized its backup environment with services from BTL to protect data that included SQL databases, iSeries data, application data from Microsoft Exchange, as well as a large volume of unstructured data. BTL was able to provide its Asigra-based solution to automatically and regularly back-up and protect data, according to policies set by L.K. Bennett. The solution also provided the ability to connect to local network storage to further increase the local recovery capabilities.

Van Eck from L.K. Bennett reported that the switch to the Cloud Backup Connector Appliance helped the company to achieve several business benefits. “Through a centralized online monitoring portal, we receive guaranteed backup and recovery for all of our data systems as a professional and fully managed service,” said Van Eck. “The backup forms the basis for our enterprise-wide data recovery solution, which is essential to L.K. Bennett.”

“The most common recovery is of emails or contact items,” added Van Eck. “BTL provides high-performance local recovery as well as online backup and virtual disaster recovery, which is key to our organization as downtime can be very costly. The Service has been reliable and when data needs to be restored it is always available on demand. The ability to restore emails at a granular level back to the same or a different location is invaluable.”

“Cloud-based data recovery allows L.K. Bennett to overcome the limitations of traditional backup software and legacy tape solutions,” said Rob Mackle, Direct and Channel Sales Manager EMEA at BTL. “Asigra’s Cloud Backup Connector Appliance is a tool that allows companies like L.K. Bennett to securely protect their business data and meet regulatory requirements. Should they lose one or multiple servers or sites, BTL’s Virtual Disaster Recovery also allows their systems to be restored and operational with minimal impact to the business.”

“Enterprises today are finding Asigra’s end-to-end data recovery solution a more manageable and effective approach to reliably and efficiently securing their data assets,” said Tracy Staniland, VP, Corporate Marketing, Asigra. “L.K. Bennett is one more example of an industry-leader making the switch from traditional data protection models to Asigra for both technology and financial advantages that move businesses forward.”