Logicalis Solution Drives Toyota Australia’s Backup Solution

Toyota Motor Corporation Australia Ltd (TMCA) has an history of innovation in the Australian automotive sector.

Competitive pressures demand that the most cost-effective, dependable and robust technology solutions are required to underpin the company’s operational needs at all levels.

The protection of critical information, particularly for the automotive industry is an omnipresent challenge. As the automotive industry evolves, implementing innovative technology solutions ensures that the company is robust and flexible enough to navigate all terrains and support the company in the long-term.

After looking for new solutions, TMCA discovered that shifting to a cloud-based platform could offer the business a whole new range of operational efficiencies and risk mitigation.

Logicalis’ cloud-based backup-as-a-service (BaaS) allows companies to reduce spending by controlling spend based on a consumption basis. This is a critical option for industries where investment in large amounts of capex has been curbed.

TMCA generates significant amounts of data across its operations. The business needs of the organisation demand that this data is held safely, easily accessed and has reliable backup. TMCA’s IT operations were being run across four different backup technology platforms and the technology team knew that it was time to consolidate and revamp the system.

Additionally as the operations of the business became more data intensive, the backup procedure took longer. This meant that the window of opportunity to carry out the backup process was encroaching into valuable work hours and increasingly became more time intensive.

Using multiple technology platforms creates cost and manageability challenges including licensing costs and infrastructure upkeep costs. Frustrated by these mounting issues, TMCA put out an RFP for a solution that would be nimble enough to grow with the data needs of the business while producing operational benefits in a changing market environment.

The Information Systems (IS) team at TMCA realised that it needed a unified solution that could be delivered as a service and on an ‘as needed’ basis. The changing model in data usage and business demands means that a capacity-based service would bring benefits to operations.

After a detailed RFP process, Toyota found that despite canvassing the market deeply across a number of providers and competitive solutions, very few companies could offer true BaaS.

Logicalis presented a solution where the technology was robust, together with a financial modelling solution was solid and in line with the company’s evolving needs. The solution was also favoured because of Logicalis’ relationship with storage vendor EMC Corporation.

Notably, Toyota also demanded a high level of SLA provision and Logicalis delivered with clear, detailed and robust SLA terms. These SLAs allowed Toyota’s IT operations team to have certainty of outcomes and reduce vendor management overhead.

Logicalis’ BaaS portfolio comes in two flavours: corporate and enterprise. They offer infrastructure with off-site cloud replication or a cloud-only solution all backed by 24×7 management. Periodic restoration testing ensures backups have been completely successful and pricing is simple according to the volume of data being backed up and SLAs required.

Significantly the Logicalis and EMC solution offered commercial terms on a pay-by-usage basis. This is a shift in the payment for infrastructure services that allows Toyota to avoid making capital investments and to deal with demand, growth or contractions.

TMCA has consolidated its IT operations, unified its supplier relationships and created a platform that will provide security to its data – all achieved without disrupting to the business. Taking Toyota’s data to the cloud has allowed for a more streamlined approach to data management, with access and backup based on a business model that provides long term cost benefits and flexibility.

Specifically, Logicalis worked with Toyota to deliver the following outcomes:

Smooth Implementation: The implementation went smoothly, despite dealing with multiple legacy systems. Toyota, Logicalis and EMC agreed a detailed schedule and the delicate process featured hundreds of servers switching carefully from old to new in a progressive transition that ensured BC.

“These implementations are usually very difficult projects to execute but we had strong working relationships across all the parties involved. It is a complex undertaking and not something that you can easily codify beforehand. Working with the Logicalis team, we found it a much smoother experience than anticipated for such a complex transition. It was a testament to the joint team and the relationship between the three organisations,” said TMCA CIO, Ellis Brover.

Entering the cloud: The transition to the Logicalis solution only consolidated prior infrastructure into one unified platform and introduced Toyota to the experience of cloud backup solutions. The implementation includes provisioning of backup and restoration services directly from the Logicalis cloud and provisioning of local backup infrastructure and data replication to the Logicalis Cloud.

“Toyota has had servers in the cloud but we had never put backup in the cloud. This a new concept for most companies and we were glad to be the first adopters for something that provides such transformative and beneficial effects for the business,” Brover said.

Cost Reduction: The unified solution dispensed with multiple license usage fees while ensuring critical data is protected. The new financial model translates as shift from capital intensive costs to operational costs with clearer ROI and a more manageable method of controlling costs.

“Using the Logicalis and EMC solution, we have reduced our overall backup costs by 20-30% as a result of this implementation. This a considerable amount which has contributed to the organisation’s cost-reduction targets,” Brover stated.

Data protection: Centralising data that was stored across multiple geographies offers greater ability to restore data than ever before. Taking this consolidation approach de-risks the business.

The Logicalis solution is now the backup solution for everything across all TMCA departments – manufacturing, sales and distribution, HR and financial. The BaaS approach was a foray into cloud backup and has proven to be a winning element in unifying data and technology management with nimble business solutions.