2015 StorageCraft. All rights reserved. UK CASE STUDY: KOGO LIMITED

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1 1 UK CASE STUDY: KOGO LIMITED

2 In 1998, Martin Bannister set up Kogo Limited as a PC-building company. Although the company was doing well, Martin recognised that there was huge potential in offering managed services to small to medium sized businesses (SMBs). In 2000, he decided that the concept of managed services, which was completely new at the time, was the way forward for his business. Rather than having half-built PCs clutter up his office, Martin decided he would have them made on a professional production line and move his business toward managed services. Many people would have seen this change as a massive risk, but Martin knew that managed services were going to turn into a necessity for many SMBs in years to come; and as the old saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. Although Kogo is now a thriving managed service provider, Martin admits that the idea of managed services was a hard sell in the beginning. "When we started, we were one of the first, if not the first company offering managed services in the area. We only had two customers who were paying us on a monthly basis. A lot of people just weren't ready for that type of support. They just wanted to call us when they had a problem, so it was quite difficult back then. But we wanted to provide the best support services to our customers and for us, managed services made sense because we could make sure that we were at the end of the phone when they needed us." 2

3 Today, Kogo employs twenty people and provide a number of different services while always looking at new technologies that clients could utilise. "We are always researching emerging technologies and best-of-breed products whilst also narrowing the number of products we offer," explains Martin. "This allows us to have a strong technical awareness of how the products we offer work, rather than just supplying everything to everybody. By trying to do that, you will never be an expert in what you are offering. We spend quite a bit of time testing software and hardware to make sure it does what it's supposed to, and that we understand how it works and how it could benefit our customers." When Kogo first began researching backup and disaster recovery software, the main focus was to move their clients away from tape backup. "Whenever we went to a site to recover a server, we couldn't rely on the tape to get the full system up and running," explains Martin. "We could get the data back but there would be service patches that were missing, or we would pull out a patch too far, or we would do a restore from the tape and it would put down an older file that wouldn't boot. There were just way too many errors. We knew there had to be a better way of backing up, which is when I started looking into backup software." In fitting with Kogo's policy of rigorously testing new software, Martin tested a number of solutions before finding what he was looking for. "I came across StorageCraft and I was really impressed. At the time we were looking at other backup solutions but they weren't flexible enough to offer a really solid solution to our customers. That wasn't the case with StorageCraft. We were able to create an offsite backup solution based around StorageCraft that was easy to manage.' 3 Martin Bannister, Managing Director, Kogo

4 Kogo's reasoning for choosing StorageCraft goes beyond just the flexibility of the software. "We're using StorageCraft ShadowControl here and every morning I get an at 7:30am listing all the servers that have backed up and the ones that have not", explains Martin. "Then if there are one or two failures we can just go and work on those rather than having to check every single server and see whether it works or not. We are then able to forward this to the customer showing them that everything is backing up OK, which is giving them even more piece of mind." "When your engineers say to you, 'We love this product. Can we just sell this one please?' that speaks for itself. Our engineers are very selective about the software they use because for them the technical ability of the product comes before anything else. They endorse the technical ability of StorageCraft." "When your engineers say to you, 'We love this product. Can we just sell this one please?' that speaks for itself." - Martin Bannister, Managing Director at Kogo Limited StorageCraft.All rights reserved.

5 Kogo works with businesses that range from dental and medical offices all the way to recruitment agencies. One such recruitment agency is Gold Group. Gold Group is one of the largest independently owned technical recruitment companies in the UK. Founded in 2000, it specializes in providing professional staff to a number of highly technical industries: life sciences, technology, engineering, and construction. Gold Group Director, Tom Puffett, explains that the company decided to start using StorageCraft following a serious malware attack. We had a server, thankfully not our main data server, attacked by ransomware a few years back. At that time it took almost a week to get it back up and running. If it had been one of our critical servers this could have been very serious and costly for our business. Following this attack, Kogo recommend that we switch to StorageCraft." Gold Group's decision to start using StorageCraft recently paid dividends when the company received a file which contained the dreaded Cryptolocker virus. We called Kogo IT and they simply rolled back to our last backup (15 minutes before the problem occurred) and we were up and running with no disruption." In addition to being fans of StorageCraft's ability to backup and recover, Gold Group were also really impressed by the level of encryption offered by the software (up to AES 256-bit). "The information we deal with is, by its nature, very sensitive. On one hand, candidates trust us with their personal information. On the other hand, clients are sharing salary details and confidential company data with us. We need to be sure that when and where we back up this data is very safe. The level of encryption offered by StorageCraft is very reassuring." "They simply rolled back to our last backup and we were up and running with no disruption." - Tom Puffett, Managing Director at Gold Group 5

6 ABOUT KOGO LIMITED Kogo was established in 1998 by Martin Bannister as an IT Company working out of West Sussex and has grown to a staff of 20 strong.kogo is a business IT support provider that offers up to 24 hour access to skilled technical expertise to meet its clients' hardware, server or operating system needs. Kogo offer Business IT Support in 3 key areas: service desk, field support and project management and operate out of the West Sussex town of East Grinstead. To better respond to its customers' needs, Kogo has invested heavily in management, monitoring and reporting systems to ensure their clients systems are continually available, and they can see what is happening. Kogo also has its own KogoVault to ensure its client s data is safe during practically any outage. The company also offer best-of-class products, offering Kogo's client's more assurance that its take their IT seriously. Kogo's services extend to clients throughout the UK, with some clients having sites throughout the world including the USA, Rest of Europe and Africa. Some of Kogo's major client s sectors include aviation, legal services, construction, architects, recruitment, insurance, property management, heating, air-conditioning, estate agents, sales, and mechanical engineering. Primary client sizes range from 25 to 500 users. Contact Us Phone: +44 (0) enquiries@kogo.co.uk Kings House, Cantelupe Road, East Grinstead, UK 6

7 ABOUT GOLD GROUP Gold Group is a long established recruitment consultancy founded by Richard Leman (Chairman) and Tom Puffett (Managing Director). Having been in recruitment for many successful years together, they felt it was time to start their own company. The 23rd February 2000 signified the creation of Gold Group. The company has fought through several recessions to continue operating competitively. They have changed their specialisms to match that of the changing industry and to remain competitive. The name: The name was generated from Richard Lemans success at the Olympics where he won a Gold Medal (Seoul, 1988) and a Bronze Medal (Los Angeles, 1984) as part of the British Men s field hockey team. The word Gold can be seen as the anchor within the logo. It was important to integrate this within the logo to set the benchmark for future success. The team today: The team of professionals working at Gold Group has significantly grown since the company was founded in 2000 from the 2 founders, Richard and Tom, to over 50 in-house members. The company has successfully developed six different niches providing technical and professional recruitment worldwide. There is also a dedicated back-office team of professionals, ensuring company consultants have every resource they require to provide excellent service to both clients and candidates. Gold Group's team of like-minded professionals continue to set the standard high for the industry. These very employees continue to make Gold Group what it is today. Gold Group Chairman, Richard Leman, running with the Olympic Torch 7

8 ABOUT STORAGECRAFT At StorageCraft Technology, the goal of complete disaster recovery drives everything we do. Our StorageCraft Recover-Ability solution is an end-toend, best-in-class backup and disaster recovery solution that is both fast and reliable. STORAGECRAFT RECOVER-ABILITY It starts with a good backup. Our award-winning StorageCraft ShadowProtect takes complete, pristine images of your machines, including all your operating systems, applications, services, and settings. It then records changes at the sector level, so you always have an up-to-date copy of every machine in your IT environment, whether it s a critical server or an employee laptop, physical or virtual. We even work with specialized database servers, like SQL, SharePoint, or Exchange. You can get granular recovery in Exchange with ShadowProtect Granular Recovery for Exchange. You have complete control over the frequency of your backups and you can set rules for consolidation and retention to manage your precious storage space using StorageCraft ImageManager. Plus, with StorageCraft ShadowControl you can monitor the machines in your backup environment from a single interface and get alerts when a machine is running out of space, when a backup doesn t happen, or when any of a variety of conditions you specify is met. We also give you tools to test your backups using StorageCraft VirtualBoot technology, which gives you confidence that your data is safe and that a disaster won t shut you down or hold you up. If a disaster occurs, you can launch your backups as virtual machines with VirtualBoot or mount them as drives for complete, granular access to your data. Or you can pre-stage the recovery of a backup image in a virtual machine with our patented StorageCraft HeadStart Restore technology, CONTACT US StorageCraft Technology Tellengana House, Blackrock Rd, Cork, Ireland. Phone: (UK) contactus@eu.storagecraft.com so if your main server blows up, you can be up and running in minutes. You can even virtualize your data in the cloud so even Mother Nature can t keep you down. Then, you can rebuild your infrastructure and recover to all kinds of machines, physical or virtual, using our StorageCraft Hardware Independent Restore technology or ShadowProtect IT Edition. You can t be sure what kind of disaster will strike you next, but with the StorageCraft Recover-Ability solution, you can be sure it doesn t matter. You ll be just fine. Copyright 2015 StorageCraft Technology Corporation. All rights reserved. This publication is for informational purposes only. STORAGECRAFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, IN THIS PUBLICATION. StorageCraft, ShadowProtect, ShadowControl, intelligentftp, ShadowStream, ShadowCloud, and HeadStart Restore names and logos are registered trademarks and VirtualBoot, Hardware Independent Restore, Recover-Ability, ImageManager, and Cloud Services names and logos are trademarks of StorageCraft Technology Corporation. All other brands and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. 8