Organisations are ramping up their data protection capabilities as cyberattacks and downtime become more frequent than ever. With the help of Custodian Data Centres, Vitanium re-evaluated its business strategy and established itself as a key provider of data protection services for end-users.
Vitanium is a world-class data protection specialist, ISO 27001/ ISO 9001 accredited data backup service and ransomware protection provider. Founded in 2003, it meets a growing need to store sensitive data from highly regulated industries securely.
Today, Vitanium partners with data centre operators such as Custodian to deliver agile, dynamic and secure data protection services for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and end-users in the education, financial services, healthcare and legal sectors. By working directly with Custodian Data Centres, Vitanium has established a cost-effective, resilient and energy-efficient infrastructure platform to support its growth and drive market share.
Company profile
Founded in 2003, Vitanium began as an email filtering and cloud hosting services provider. As demand for cloud services quickly evolved and the value of data grew, its customers began requesting data protection, Disaster Recovery (DR) and backup services, alongside email archiving and file storage services.
With customer demands beginning to accelerate, Vitanium quickly established a partner network of data centres, IT infrastructure and Managed Service Providers (MSPs). This strategy has enabled Vitanium to hone its craft and establish itself as a key provider of data protection services for end-users and MSPs for regulated industries who need real-time access to business-critical applications and state-of-the-art data security.
From financial services to education, healthcare and legal organisations, protecting the critical data created by companies within these sectors is crucial. Vitanium has proven that it can be relied upon to keep its customers’ assets safe, secure and connected.
Challenges
As its business grew with the demands of Big Data, so did the number of partners in its ecosystem. However, with customers in several cities across the UK, and its expert technical teams based in Kent, Essex and Bristol, the company had to be very selective with its choice of data centre provider, which would supply the foundations for its services.
As such, a central London facility was first chosen as the primary facility, but the costs far outweighed the benefits. Connectivity was expensive, there was a lack of technical support and access to site became key issues almost immediately. Transporting expensive and vital equipment to the city-centre location had also become a drain on resources and Vitanium could see the strain that the London-based data centre was placing on its business.
Further, resilience, connectivity and service availability were fundamental to Vitanium’s business model and after experiencing a series of outages, cost increases and infrastructure challenges, the company chose to migrate its mission-critical hardware outside of London and identify new operators to work with.
After identifying a number of operators in the south-east of England, Vitanium shortlisted a series of potential partners that could provide it with a scalable, sustainable and cost-effective platform for growth.
Resilience, diverse network connectivity and energy efficiency would be crucial so that the company could minimise its overheads and CO2 emissions while delivering state-of-the-art ransomware and security services to its customers.
Further, with plans to scale its business in line with growing customer demands, Vitanium needed a partner that would support its growth without the worry that the data centre operator would offer competitive backup or security services.
Proposed solution
Vitanium’s research led it to Custodian Data Centres which offered an award-winning, energy-efficient and agile, mission-critical infrastructure platform that would perfectly accommodate its needs. Its in-house technical expertise, reputation for 99.9% uptime and unwavering commitment to dynamic customer service meant Vitanium had found an ideal partner to help it realise its ambitions.
Further, as a leading colocation data centre provider, its ME2 facility was easily accessible, meaning the company’s engineers could avoid the costly and resource-intensive trips into the city. Moreover, with a demonstrable track record in supporting the needs of the managed services, financial services and public sectors, Custodian’s reputation and proven technological foundations would prove crucial as Vitanium scaled within its chosen customer industries.
“The location of the data centre is essential to our business model, as are the technical capabilities of its in-house services team,” said Paul Houselander, Technical Director, Vitanium. “Custodian have always provided expert support exactly when we need it, underpinning our reputation for delivering advanced data backup and ransomware protection services.
“The renewable energy and efficiency aspects of the facility were also impressive, meaning we could scale our IT infrastructure and do so with minimal impact on the environment. This, we believe, will be important for our customers going forward.”
Result
The partnership with Custodian has delivered significant advantages for Vitanium, and from a purely technical perspective, the data centre operator has been able to directly support its growth, which has surged by 400%.
The company’s technical team has also played a key role in helping Vitanium modernise and consolidate its storage infrastructure. From humble beginnings on 300GB storage arrays in 2003, Custodian’s technical team has also played a key role in helping Vitanium continuously modernise and consolidate its storage infrastructure, with the latest installs using 18TB Helium drives to reduce its energy consumption and provide a more sustainable service. To put that into context, Custodian’s ME2 data centre uses five times less energy per kW of IT load than the average UK facility.
Coupled with the technical and sustainability advantages, Custodian also delivered dynamic service support combined with seamless, always-on availability. Its expert remote hands team, for example, regularly saves Vitanium valuable travel time, on average six hours per round trip, depending on where Vitanium’s engineers are based and are on hand 24 hours a day to ensure service reliability when its needed most.
Custodian also played a critical advisory role in Vitanium’s MPLS/backhaul installation, which offered significant practical advantages in terms of network resilience and delivers a diverse, low latency and end-to-end connectivity solution, which will support Vitanium as it expands its services portfolio.
“Over the next 12-18 months we believe we will see significant growth in cloud-hosted services, Edge Computing, data backup and ransomware protection services,” said Dave Bullock, Managing Director, Vitanium. “We’ve recently launched our own Object Storage platform, which has a variety of use cases, especially in the protection of data against the latest cybersecurity threats such as ransomware. We’re also expanding our existing offers, providing BDR (Backup and Disaster Recovery) hardware to customers on a HaaS (Hardware-as-a-Service) model, which will be SLA-backed by our cloud offering. As such, our relationship with Custodian will prove vital as we continue to grow.”
