ATTIX5 STAMPS OUT RISK FACTOR FOR THE MONEY SHOP

Background

The Money Shop works within the finance industry as part of the unbanked sector.  Theyoffer payday loans, pawnbroking, cheque cashing, foreign currency, gold-buying services, pre-loaded holiday and cash debit cards and money transfers.It operates more than 530 stores and its support centre shares the site of parent company Dollar Financial UK in Nottingham. It has the largest store-based network of shops in the short-term credit sector.

The Challenge

Each of The Money Shop’s stores had its own business database containing daily sales information, which is uploaded and merged with a central database at Head Office on a nightly cycle. The original daily mitigation within each store against hardware failure and losing that day’s datawas to maintain a backup on a disk, so if a failure occurred the business would be able to restore the datawithout affecting trade.  To protect the local backups The Money Shop firstly decided to encrypt their disks with software, but discovered limitations, as they found it would take two weeks to restore onto the system if a failure occurred. Not only would it actually slow business process’s down but it also wouldn’t protect the company if theft and natural disaster occurred.

Due to the numerous risks identified with their current backup process, The Money Shop decided that they needed a cloud based solution to backup their data. This solution would not only have to backup and restore their data efficiently and effectively, but would also have to preserve large amounts of customer sensitive data securelyas well as create a secure transmission from each store to the main business database.

The Solution

During their research into cloud based backup providers, The Money Shop came across the Attix5 Titanium appliance which offered the business a new option to address backing up their data across its 530 stores. Attix5 helped The Money Shopto implement a hybrid cloud backup solution by giving them the ability to manage backups through the cloud whilst storing the data locally. With the help of Attix5 The Money Shop was able to pre-configure a single backup client with the custom settings needed for their 530 stores nationwide. This custom MSI installer took next to no time to design andenabled The Money Shop to automatically perform a silent install, create the backup account and ensure the correct data was selected for backup on a predefined schedule allowing easy compression and de-duplication. Once tested across some of The Money Shop’s 10 sites, the next steps wereto confidently allow all remaining 530 sites to install and start performing their backups. Within 24 hours all Money Shop sites had finished their first backups. The Attix5 reporting then confirmed how much data had been sent and the compression & de-duplication was very impressive.

The Results

By implementing the Attix5 Titanium appliance The Money Shop were able to mitigate the risks they had previously faced with backing up their data.  It provided The Money Shop with unlimited licences as well as being simple to network across each of its stores.  The reporting feature gives senior managers a clear and concise picture on the security and efficiency of the whole organisations data backups.  The risk of human intervention and error during the backup process is now removed, as this is now automated and scheduled by the Attix5 Titanium appliance.  The software was flexible allowing The Money Shop to configure the solution to match their exact requirements regarding security and data retention policies and through the advanced console give them a view of all of the stores data. Ultimately Attix5 significantly reduced the time it would take for The Money Shop’s stores to come back online should a hardware failure occur, transcending from weeks to just hours and in turn dramatically increasing productivity and reducing business down time.

Moving Forward

Through continued support Attix5 willassist The Money Shop with their online security network and will work with them in the future to bring the latest solutions to improve their business management. Attix5 is looking forward to responding to The Money Shop’s future needs in a proactive fashion.

About Attix5

Attix5 has always followed a different approach to data protection. Since its infancy in 1999, cloud and security have been part of its DNA. Today, their data protection software and professional services provide absolute peace of mind to SMEs and listed enterprises around the world. Its recent innovation in disaster recovery, DynamicRestore has firmly placed Attix5 amongst the leaders offering disaster recovery and business continuity solutions.