Actifio Helping Santee Cooper Keep Lights on

As Hurricane Michael swept through a wide swath of the southeastern US this month, power providers like Santee Cooper had to be at their best in every aspect of their operations.

While the storm did not impact Santee Cooper’s South Carolina customers as severely as it could have, the company did dispatch workers to the most intensely affected areas and kept its vital data and communications flowing throughout.

Actifio, Inc. helps Santee Cooper, South Carolina’s largest public power provider, keep its data available no matter what kind of disaster may strike. Through the adoption of the platform, Santee Cooper has experienced improved customer satisfaction, heightened management trust and near instantaneous data retrieval to simplify its data infrastructure.

Modernization
Santee Cooper is a state-owned public power utility organization based in South Carolina. Approximately 1,650 employees provide electricity, clean drinking water, environmental stewardship and jobs to over 2 million South Carolinian residents. With energy customers across the state depending on Santee Cooper, the power provider knew its IT systems needed to be upgraded in order to protect its customer data as its previous hardware and software licenses were nearing the end of life. It was time for Santee Cooper to replace its aging backup systems with a reliable, multi-dimensional solution. The search led to Actifio.

Using Actifio, Santee Cooper eliminated slow and inefficient systems to create a more consolidated platform for copy data management and data protection, while also leveraging the latest techniques for data capture and deduplication. Beyond its new backup functionalities, Santee Cooper also instituted a flexible DevOps server function that can be quickly set up as needed. They also began using the Actifio Sky virtual appliance to conduct local backups at remote sites.

Talicia McCants, supervisor of IT systems support, Santee Cooper, said: “We started with a ton of challenges, but we were confident in the Actifio capabilities. We needed to adapt and change processes, and to some degree, the product needed to adapt to us. Actifio’s service team has been excellent. They took the time to fully understand our environment and how we operate to help us with whatever we needed.“

Ash Ashutosh, CEO, Actifio, said: “Our work with Santee Cooper demonstrates how the Actifio software platform eases the process of digital transformation. It’s important to have true partners to embark on these transformations with, especially when an organizations plays such a vital role in its home state’s infrastructure.“

Case study