Langdale Industries, Inc. is a holding company and parent company of 26 subsidiary companies. It is a highly diversified enterprise, as its subsidiaries include forestry, forest products and other affiliate companies that span the automotive, banking, hospitality and land development industries. Centralized administrative and support functions of the organization include executive management, industrial relations, legal, environmental, computer services, treasury, internal audit and accounting.
Langdale IT is responsible for managing, maintaining, and securing the IT environments of all of the company’s subsidiaries, so it oversees multiple data centers and networks. About five of the subsidiaries are managed on the corporate office network, but the remaining companies each run a separate environment managed by Langdale IT.
IT was keen to standardize key elements of each IT environment, such as data protection and disaster recovery (DR), while allowing each subsidiary to have the flexibility to do what it needed.
To protect it’s VMware VMs and physical servers across its locations, it relied on Veeam which stored backup data on NAS or other types of storage on-premises. “We believe in the 3-2-1 rule, but with Veeam we were not utilizing their cloud-based backup, so we were limited to on-premise backups. This meant we didn’t have a robust DR strategy,” said Robert Elworthy, assistant director of IT.