Ausenco strengthens security and cuts management time with Cohesity DataProtect delivered as a service

The Challenge

Ausenco’s engineering and consulting services business is growing—especially among mining companies experiencing soaring demand for battery metals. The company backs up 100 TB of critical M365 data for its more than 3,000 employees. “Microsoft provides some data protection built-in, but not enough for our business,” says Kalpesh Bhathella, Ausenco’s Director of Operational Services. “We retain some SharePoint and OneDrive files indefinitely, and can’t afford to lose them to cyber attacks.”

Until 2022, Ausenco’s IT team backed up M365 data with Veeam software, using infrastructure as a service (IaaS) from Amazon Web Services (AWS). But managing the infrastructure and software was brutal, consuming 50% of one IT administrator’s time. Another shortcoming: taking immutable backup copies, a must-have to recover from cyberattacks, would require more infrastructure and more management time. “Security is top of mind for us,” Bhathella says. “Prospective customers always ask about it, and lately they also want to know if we have cyber insurance. We needed immutable copies, but without more management burden.”

The Solution

After evaluating Cohesity and Rubrik, Ausenco selected Cohesity DataProtect delivered as a service, which provides backup and recovery capabilities for software as a service (SaaS) like M365 as well as other cloud or on-premises data Ausenco might add later. “We liked the idea of a fully-managed cloud service because self-managing infrastructure makes no sense in this day and age if IT is not your core business,” Bhathella says. “And only Cohesity creates immutable backups by default.”

The Cohesity cloud service was up and running quickly in approximately 2 weeks. The IT team rarely has to think about it anymore. “After initial configuration, Cohesity just worked,” Bhathella says. “On the rare occasions when we’ve needed support, Cohesity figured it out right away. We’ve never had to escalate.”

The Results

For Ausenco, the top benefit of the Cohesity solution is a stronger security posture. “We do everything we can to prevent cyberattacks, but having the ability to restore clean M365 data from Cohesity’s immutable backup copies means we have a solid fallback. Storing immutable backups offsite also helped us qualify for cyber insurance, which prospective customers ask about.”

Stronger security costs less, not more. “The savings from not having to pay monthly fees for cloud infrastructure fully paid for Cohesity DataProtect delivered as a service,” says Bhathella. “On top of that, we’re saving the 20 hours a week we used to spend tuning and managing our backup software and cloud infrastructure.” The team member who used to devote 50% of their time managing backups can now spend that time on higher-value digital transformational work. And together with Ausenco’s other cybersecurity measures, immutable backups helped the company qualify for favorable rates on its cyber insurance policy.

For the first time, Ausenco is offering a 4-hour SLAs for M365 email or file recovery — a big hit with the company’s busy engineering, consulting, and operations teams. “With our old backup solution, restoring a lost Exchange, SharePoint, or OneDrive file could take weeks because our IT admin had to comb through hundreds of backups just to find it,” Bhathella says. “Cohesity’s search engine is like the Google of backups. We just enter a filename or phrase, and a list pops up. The file we’re looking for is often right on top.”

Now Ausenco is preparing to use Cohesity DataProtect delivered as a service to protect other workloads besides M365, including on-prem and AWS virtual machines. For extra resilience Bhathella plans to back up certain workloads on Microsoft Azure — a hybrid cloud setup. The IT team will be able to view and manage backups and restores in any cloud from the same Cohesity interface, enjoying a unified management experience.

As Bhathella sums it up, “With Cohesity DataProtect delivered as a service we have everything we need to protect any kind of data as our business grows: immutable backups, fast restores, and great support — all without having to worry about infrastructure management.”