Centerbase
SaaS Platform Serves Legal Firms with Smart Storage
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Centerbase
Zach Young
IT Director, Centerbase
Clients
Protection
Click Recovery
For Centerbase, a software as a service (SaaS) platform serving high-performing legal practices, nothing is more important than security and performance. While they run a robust, replicated, on-premises data storage system, they found that they could not meet their desired recovery time objectives (RTO) if they faced a disaster that took out both their production and disaster recovery (DR) sites.
To overhaul their storage architecture and meet their RTOs, Centerbase first tiered critical infrastructure to Backblaze B2 via Veeam Backup and Replication to serve as an off-site backup so they could recover in a scorched earth scenario. They also shored up their on-premises backups with a high-performance Object First Ootbi device.
With immutable backups in both Backblaze and Ootbi, Centerbase’s critical infrastructure is protected both on-premises and off. They’re able to fulfill new data protection requirements from their cyber insurance carrier. And RTO is improved with the new solution, including a true off-site backup stored in Backblaze.
Centerbase serves high-profile law firms, helping them run more efficiently with high-value features like comprehensive, automated time capture that allows attorneys to bill for time they might otherwise miss, case file management, customer relationship management (CRM), and more.
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First, Centerbase replicates their production data directly to a disaster recovery (DR) site. Then, using Veeam Backup and Replication software, they back up non-critical infrastructure to on-premises network attached storage (NAS) devices and critical infrastructure to an on-premises Object First Ootbi device (Ootbi stands for Out-of-the-Box-Immutability). They utilize Veeam Version 12’s Direct-to-Object-Storage feature to back up critical infrastructure to Backblaze B2. With three layers of protection, this setup gives them fast recovery times from their on-premises infrastructure, while also providing an immutable, off-site backup in Backblaze that they can use to recover should their production and DR sites be affected by disaster or ransomware.
Lawyers need to be able to access their files immediately at all times of the day, so downtime is unacceptable for Centerbase, and ransomware is always a threat when storing sensitive data. Like many enterprise IT organizations, Centerbase has robust, tiered, replicated on-premises storage infrastructure to meet fast RTO requirements. But, IT Director Zach Young knows that even the smartest on-premises storage still won’t protect your business data if a disaster takes out all of your physical locations, or if ransomware infiltrates both your replication site and your production data. It is a risk he knows he can’t tolerate if he wants to maintain uptime metrics that rival major diversified cloud providers.
At Centerbase, I have to run a tighter ship than AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. And our uptime numbers reflect that.
Zach Young, IT Director, Centerbase
Young utilized Veeam’s Direct-to-Object-Storage feature to back up Centerbase’s critical infrastructure to Backblaze to serve as an off-site, virtually air-gapped backup should their on-premises production, backups, and even DR site go down. Setting up the Direct-to-Object feature took just minutes. And, Young appreciated that recoveries are as easy as a right click compared to other backup solutions like LTO.
What won me over quickly was the fact that the Backblaze team was able to help me configure it during a video call. I knew if it was that easy, this was the right solution for us because it meant all the hard stuff was figured out.
Zach Young, IT Director, Centerbase
With Object Lock from Backblaze, Centerbase’s data can’t be altered. When you set the lock, you can specify the length of time an object should be locked. Any attempts to manipulate, copy, encrypt, change, or delete the object will be blocked during that time. The feature proved valuable when Centerbase’s cyber insurance carrier increased their requirements, asking not just if the company had backups but if they were immutable, and Young was able to say: Yes.
Security is massively important in the legal sector. I’m not parking my data just anywhere. The fact that Backblaze offers immutability through Object Lock is extremely important so that data can’t be accessed or manipulated.
Zach Young, IT Director, Centerbase
The combination of Backblaze B2, Veeam, and Ootbi simplified and strengthened Centerbase’s storage and backup architecture. Even with their primary DR center and their extensive NAS storage arrays, they would not have been able to rebuild their infrastructure fast enough to limit business impact. Now, if their primary DR site is affected by ransomware or natural disaster, they can turn to their Backblaze B2 backups to quickly restore data and meet RTO requirements
Veeam is the global market leader in data protection and ransomware recovery. The Veeam Data Platform delivers a single solution for cloud, virtual, physical, SaaS, and Kubernetes environments that gives IT and security leaders peace of mind that their apps and data are protected and always available.
Object First’s Ootbi device is ransomware-resistant and out-of-the-box immutable. It delivers secure, simple, and powerful backup storage for local Veeam repositories. Ootbi is built on immutable object storage technology designed and optimized for on-premises backup and recovery performance.
