Summit Exploration moves to Cloud Backup and DR

“The ET backup and DR-as-a-Service offering provided me with a simple and cost-effective way of securing our key business data assets. Knowing that this data is accessible and available to me in the event of a disaster at our production site provides me with peace of mind. Furthermore, because the data is isolated in a private cloud service hosted in the UK, there is the assurance of the isolation of these data assets, which supports my security and compliance requirements. This is not something I can easily achieve with public cloud services. The personal approach to doing business and the customisability and flexibility of the service offered by ET was a key element in my decision to go down this route.”

— Richard Inwards, IT Manager 

The Challenge

Summit Exploration and Production Ltd is a London based, wholly-owned subsidiary of the Sumitomo Corporation. The company is focused on finding, developing and producing oil and gas assets in the UK as well as Africa and other European regions in the near future. Summit is positioning itself to obtain a good balance between exploration, development and production assets.

Due to the cyclical nature of the oil and gas industry, operators have always found it beneficial to adopt more cost-effective and flexible models for procuring IT services. Backup and disaster recovery is one of the key areas where efficiencies can be achieved by moving to a service-based model, particularly since there exists a requirement to store such data off-site at an alternative, secondary site to protect against a disaster at the primary datacentre. Coupled with constantly growing and often unpredictable data set changes due to mergers and acquisitions, Summit sought to explore more innovative ways to meet its off-site backup and DR needs, without tying itself into large capital expenditures or commitment to a particular set of backup technology.

Summit required an off-site backup target and DR facility for their core business IT services, which would allow them to meet stringent RPO and RTO SLA’s set by the business in the event of a disaster at the primary datacentre.

The Solution

ET Backup-as-a-Service and DR-as-a-Service, delivered from ET’s Nutanix cloud platform in our secure Tier 3/4 datacentre. ET’s offering was provided on an OpEx-only model with no up-front commitment from the customer and could scale and adapt to Summit’s changing needs, whilst still ensuring the privacy and security of their critical business data.

The Benefits

Availability of all business critical data, whether that be for long term backup retention or disaster recovery scenarios.