Ster-Kinekor sees 50% cost savings from CloudProtect data backup solution

1st August 2016

Ster-Kinekor sees 50% cost savings from CloudProtect data backup solution

About the client
Ster-Kinekor Theatres is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Primedia Group, and the dominant player in the South African cinema industry. It operates 54 movie complexes nationwide – a total of over 400 screens and 63 000 seats. It also operates the art house Cinema Nouveau chain – which has 5 complexes seating almost 3600.
 
Challenge
Ster-Kinekor was using a data backup and disaster recovery solution from a third party which was adequate in its performance. However, it didn’t have direct control over the data, and had to submit requests and wait for a period of time, whenever it wanted to get data back.
 
With every aspect of its operational data – from inventory, to ticketing, to financials – locked up in this repository, there was a risk associated with data only being available at arm’s length.
 
Ster-Kinekor was also not effectively translating this mass of operational data into actionable business insights to drive future strategies and better understand its millions of movie-loving patrons each year.
 
Solution
Ster-Kinekor selected DDP Consulting, a local specialist in the protection and recovery of data, to deploy CloudProtect backup-as-a-service.  They recommended CloudProtect (a hosted backup and recovery solution), that is offered, supported and managed by Gabsten Technologies, is locally hosted at the Teraco data centre.
 
DDP Consulting and Gabsten Technologies worked closely on the project. DDP’s Dave Parmenter explains the process: “We took a phased approach to the rollout, which took just a couple of weeks. In that time every cinema complex around the country was migrated onto the CloudProtect platform, managed by the combined teams and facilitated by automated rollout processes”.
 
Importantly, CloudProtect streams live information back to one’s database, with the intelligence to interrogate each file and identify what has changed, and then only update the data which has been altered since the previous day’s backup.
 
“This represents a more efficient, faster, and less bandwidth-intensive approach to data transfer,” explains Gabsten MD Iniel Dreyer, “and as data growth continues to explode, it becomes the sustainable way to manage ever-greater data volumes in the future.”
 
Business benefits
Within the first year of being live in production, CloudProtect has yielded a number of clear benefits to the cinema giant, including these highlights:
 

Ster-Kinekor’s IT Executive, Andre Potgieter, comments that: “CloudProtect fits perfectly into our existing data protection managed services framework. When combined with Gabsten’s expertise in support and management, we have total confidence in the safety of our data.”
 
He adds that “DDP was the logical choice when it came to implementing the solution, due to its laser focus on data protection, its close partnership with CloudProtect, and previous excellent experiences working together.”

Ultimately, the CloudProtect solution has allowed the cinema operator to get far closer to one of its most important assets: its data. The backups are running well and data recovery has been tested with no failures.  With Gabsten’s continual protection of the cinema data, Ster-Kinekor is able to guarantee the safety of its information and focus on its core business and innovation strategies.