Restorepoint Facilitates Faster Network Recovery

As a lighthouse authority, this corporation is responsible for the provision and maintenance of maritime lighthouses and other navigational aides, such as lightvessels, buoys, and maritime radio/satellite communication systems.

The IT team, in addition to supporting normal organizational services such as email, web services, project management, also maintains the network that monitors the lighthouses that guide mariners safely around some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.

With 95% of imported goods arriving by sea, ensuring ships arrive safely is extremely important not just to the mariners. Any downtime that might affect their network or remote sites must be kept to a minimum.

Each site has a number of network devices such as firewalls, switches, and routers from several different vendors including Bluecoat, Cisco, Checkpoint, HP, and Nokia. While the equipment is chosen for its stability, outages still affect even the most resilient networks, as their Network Manager explains.

Backing up configuration settings for multiple network devices manually was so labor intensive that it was only carried out once a month. This left a period of time where the corporation was potentially at risk if a device failed or needed to be restored and changes had been made to the network in between backup schedules.

Recovering from a hardware failure or an outage caused by human error (misconfiguration), should be a relatively simple operation for most organizations. However, it frequently takes longer than expected because a backup of the previous working configuration is not up-to-date. This only adds to the pressure of a network outage, as engineers attempt to rectify the situation by making live changes or rebuilding a configuration to its last known state from what they remember.

Even where scripts are used to automate the configuration backup process, manual recovery is still required. Scripted backups may also not work as intended because each script requires regular maintenance and testing to ensure that what is being backed up can actually be recovered.

With ScienceLogic’s Restorepoint solution to automate network configuration processes, the corporation has been able to centralize configuration management processes for its team of engineers, providing a single point for configuration backup, recovery, compliance, and change monitoring.

Their Network Manager continues, “Deploying Restorepoint has allowed us to completely automate our backups. All of our network devices can be managed from a centralized console and backups can be scheduled as frequently as required. We also receive notification whenever a device is altered.”

Restorepoint enables organizations to save hours of administration per week, backup network configurations without complex scripts or manual processes.

Dedicated to safeguarding shipping and seafarers in one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, the corporation is laser focused on being operationally secure, automating backups, and restoring network operations as quickly and easily as possible.

By centralizing network configuration management processes via ScienceLogic’s Restorepoint, they have been able to measure the value the solution brings in many ways. Equally important is their ability to automatically discover, manage, and track network assets, as well as simplify and automate network change processes, making complex network configuration changes across multi-vendor network platforms, in seconds.

And Restorepoint’s network backup solution can help you quickly recover from network outages caused by hardware failures, misconfiguration errors, or security breaches. The Network Manager adds, “With Restorepoint, it doesn’t matter if you’re recovering from the failure of a core switch or a simple problem with an access port, restoring the configurations is an easy and fast process.”

With the need for increased visibility, every organization depends on the availability and security of its network infrastructure to provide the applications and services that drive their business. Even a short network outage caused by hardware failure or misconfiguration can lead to significant financial loss and loss of productivity. Unlike server infrastructure, where many solutions exist for disaster recovery, network configuration management and backing up network devices is a complex and often manual task.

ScienceLogic’s Restorepoint solution has not only greatly improved the efficiency of their network configuration processes, it has enabled service health, availability and risk reduction, ensuring considerable time savings for their business.