Dialog Information Technology builds a better backup strategy with Azure and Metallic

Dialog Information Technology is ready to start the conversation about the future of IT. The company’s more than 1,200 information technology specialists and business consultants help Australian businesses across all industries maximize their IT investments through application and web development and major systems integration services. When the leading technology services company wanted to modernize its own IT environment, it undertook its cloud journey with Microsoft Azure. Dialog is now using Azure to dive deep into its business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy without adding complexity or additional operational costs, helping ensure seamless and highly secure future growth.

Transitioning to Azure and connecting employees to the cloud

As a Gold competency member of the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program, Dialog has been a Microsoft shop for several years. It holds Microsoft 365 licenses with multilayered security safeguards to support productivity from anywhere among its employees. One of its core products that’s designed for the Australian market, PayFocus, connects with Dynamics 365, including Dynamics 365 Business Central and Power BI, to make payroll reporting smoother than ever. These successful applications of Microsoft resources cemented the company’s consideration of Azure for the next phase of its digital transformation.

In 2019, Dialog started to explore decommissioning its physical offices and offloading everything from its on-premises datacenters to the cloud. The global shift to remote working with little preparation time in early 2020 underscored the need to evolve quickly.

On-premises, Dialog ran a full stack of hypervisors with failover clustering, which it ultimately found too slow and limiting. As part of its modernization efforts, the company architected and moved its entire infrastructure model to on-premises VMware clusters, within which it has hundreds of Windows Server and Linux virtual machines. It can scale up within an hour as needed. “We formed new servers, new storage, and upgraded the networking from a 10-gigabyte backbone to a 25-gigabyte backbone,” says Dhruv Sahni, IT Infrastructure Manager at Dialog Information Technology. “Since that day, we haven’t had a single issue, delay, or dropout. In the future, we’re considering getting rid of the datacenters and VMware and relying on Azure to do almost everything for us at a lower cost."

Enhancing business continuity with better backups

Dialog also wanted to introduce a cloud backup solution to support business continuity and drive efficiencies while protecting the data its teams rely on most. Clients ranging from capital-intensive corporations, including software development companies, to government agencies entrust Dialog with their data. As a result, potential downtime could cause major liabilities and a loss of trust, making preventing disruption a critical business priority. “If our SharePoint sites get compromised and a backup isn’t there, we might not only be losing data but also clients, along with our reputation,” says Sahni.

To this end, Dialog uses Commvault’s Metallic software as a service (SaaS) solution, which is built on Azure, to safeguard more than 12 terabytes of sensitive and critical customer data held within the business, including Exchange mailboxes, OneDrive files, and SharePoint sites. With Metallic, backups occur automatically and reliably so that data can be quickly recovered from the cloud in the event of failure. “In terms of a disaster or attack on our virtual machines, we can use Metallic to roll back in no time,” says Sahni. “And there’s no need for a specialized person to do that job because our IT team can easily handle it.”

Tapping into the SaaS solution for enhanced monitoring, the company uses detailed, daily Metallic reports to validate that the total number of items and users backed up match. This helps avoid potential syncing issues with little or no human intervention. “Using Metallic, we‘ve successfully delegated the responsibility of monitoring the growing components of our workloads on a daily basis,” says Sahni. “Since configuring Metallic, we’ve experienced seamless operations without the need for constant supervision or intervention.”

Making the most of the cloud with joint Microsoft, Commvault BCDR solutions

Demonstrating the power of joint cloud solutions through its use of Commvault’s Metallic solution and Microsoft resources including Azure Backup, Dialog enjoys backups and storage working in harmony. It seamlessly backs up from cloud to cloud without an intermediary or dedicated hardware. “Bringing every single piece of technology together is a painful process, and then backing up data with redundancy and making sure that on-premises hardware isn’t failing are also massive challenges,” explains Sahni. “With Microsoft Azure and Metallic from Commvault, we don’t need to think about how we would recover if things went sideways, and Microsoft and Commvault experts are always available to get things started again even if they did.”

As the company continues to grow in the cloud, Dialog IT teams no longer lose sleep running and managing its datacenters. “As we continue transitioning to Azure, the manual labor part of running a datacenter will disappear,” says Sahni. “I’ve decommissioned approximately 40 servers and virtualized everything into only four hypervisors.” Dialog has also gained confidence in its security strategy and is working toward full ISO 27001 compliance. This is particularly important because it supports highly regulated customers such as the Australian government, police, and defense departments.

A variety of benefits across the business

Dialog’s move to Azure and focus on business continuity has resulted in a variety of benefits in the syncing and backup process, including cost and time savings. Having dedicated backup capacity with Metallic and Azure Backup and not needing to build and maintain its own infrastructure means employees spend less time on repetitive tasks and focus more on expanding the business. No longer needing specialized skills, more people in the business can now restore their environments from a previous backup if necessary.

As a rapidly growing business, Dialog particularly appreciates that it can now set up backups on the fly. “Our Metallic backups are set up as if more workloads are being added, and no human intervention is required for that,” says Sahni. “Metallic ensures unlimited backups for all data, eliminating our need to pay for additional storage and allowing us to freely utilize an infinite amount of data without incurring any costs.” Because Metallic complements its Azure-native services, Dialog has been able to save on costs it would otherwise have incurred on other cloud storage services. Additionally, the company’s Microsoft 365 backups are taking 95 percent less time with an AUD20,000 reduction in annual licensing costs and AUD50,000 less in upfront costs with Metallic.

Moving forward, the company’s refreshed technology stack—with Microsoft and Commvault at the forefront—gives it the opportunity to explore new ways to further consolidate backups, strengthen threat detection, and increase sustainability. An independent economic validation study by Enterprise Strategy Group underscored how companies like Dialog have successfully used Azure and Metallic together to realize their sustainability goals.

Dialog’s plan for the future is to adopt as many Azure resources as possible as it continues to build out its cloud vision. Along with Metallic backups, ramping up disaster recovery on Azure will help the company access improved failover protection and other safeguards almost immediately whenever it needs them. “In the long term, we want to take advantage of everything from Azure rather than having a traditional on-premises practice, and with Commvault, we’ll be exploring how to add everything that we run on Azure to our Metallic backup solution,” says Sahni. “What I know is that our resilient business strategy with Commvault’s Metallic and Microsoft Azure is something that you need to have while running this show.”

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