The Pioneer Group

The Pioneer Group is a partnership of people and organizations working closely with other local partners to deliver community-driven housing solutions, youth services, family support, health and employment.

The Challenge

Mohammad Sarfraz, the IT Network Administrator at The Pioneer Group, is directly responsible for the entire group’s network infrastructure. Tasked with standardizing IT across the group, Mohammad needed processes in place to ensure staff laptops, mobile phones and screens run smoothly. He also works closely with the help desk IT trainees, so the whole IT operation is a real team effort.

“With our previous backup supplier, we made the move from tape to off-site backups, which was a huge jump for us” said Mohammad. “But then technology moved on and our solution provider failed to keep up. It just wasn’t good enough for what we needed for our backup and DR. It wasn’t quick or robust enough.”

“Following a failure, we found it could take up to a day and half just to restore everything back.”

Rubrik as a Service From Assured

With the issues they were facing with their current provider, the need for a new managed backup, DR and VDI provider was evident. The Pioneer Group explored multiple other solutions as part of a tender process, and they ultimately found Assured Data Protection, powered by Rubrik, was the right fit for them.

“We work closely with Sandeep (Recovery Specialist at Assured) and his colleagues. They were able to create a tailored solution for us to be able to utilize Rubrik across the entire group. From the start of the process it was just seamless. The proof-of-concept process was really good. It gave us complete peace of mind before we fully deployed the solution that it was going to work. We can now restore a VM with the click of a button, and I am saving at least 2 hours out of my day which means I am freed up to work on other tasks.”

Mohammad went on to say: “Our TCO has reduced by at least 50% compared to our previous solution when considering time and money across the IT team. I would also say it is at least 20% cheaper than other solutions we looked at, even considering Assured is fully managed, the others were not.”

Assured provides a daily email report for each of its customers, powered by its bespoke monitoring platform, AssuredView. At a glance, you can see the status of all your backups and if anything requires attention, it’s quick and easy to investigate and Assured’s Global Support team is on hand to assist if needed.

Mohammad believes that Assured’s reporting capability is one of its best tools. “The reporting is so good. I don’t need to run around trying to figure out what failed, I just look at the daily email. Each day I receive a nice, simple report. The first page tells me if anything has failed and if it’s all green, I don’t need to look any further. It literally takes seconds.”

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

The Pioneer Group utilizes Citrix for its employees to be able to work virtually, which is why they chose to include VDI as a Service as part of their package with Assured. In the event of a failure with Citrix, the team at Assured can move everything onto their own environment while the issue is resolved, minimizing the risk of any down-time.

“We recently had an issue with Citrix. One of our updates failed and it knocked the whole system out. This could have been a huge issue if we didn’t have Assured on board. Without Citrix up and running, our 130+ employees wouldn’t have been able to log in remotely. Sandeep and the team resolved the issue quickly, saving us 2+ days of company time.”

The Future with Assured and Rubrik

The Pioneer Group is so happy with the service they receive from Assured that they plan to continue to grow with them. “The great thing about Assured is that they are scalable and flexible. As our data management requirement increases, Assured can accommodate that.”