No matter what your industry, providing an excellent customer experience is a requirement. In fact, PwC reports that one in three consumers will walk away from a brand they love after one bad experience 1. A good customer experience is frictionless and personable, with some of the most important aspects being speed and convenience.
Telecommunications companies are no exception. In fact, they are held to more rigorous standards than most. Customers expect a frictionless experience with their service and devices, both of which are integral in today’s connected world.
The need for a resilient platform is especially apparent when we see the catastrophic results of service outages. Over 8.5 million devices experienced prolonged service interruptions during the recent outage triggered by a bug in a CrowdStrike software update. The error resulted in over 5,000 flight cancellations from airlines around the globe, throttled government and hospital services, and even interrupted 911 services in certain areas2
A long-standing Portworx telecommunications customer is ahead of the curve in adopting new technologies to support this customer experience. In the same way they needed a quick, convenient, and reliable experience for their customers, they also needed a solution to ensure that their data protection was quick, convenient, and reliable—especially considering that telecommunications companies are expected to provide always-on service. This is why they chose Portworx Backup as their partner for Kubernetes backup and restore.
Data protection is an enterprise necessity
Backup and recovery for Kubernetes applications can often be an afterthought for many infrastructure teams. Developers are largely focused on building and deploying new applications to support business objectives. However, data protection is a critical part of any team’s Day 2 operations and should not be forgotten. Accidents, like deletions, failures, and errors, could spell disaster if critical data is lost, and enterprises need to be able to recover this data quickly.
This telecommunications company takes data protection seriously. They have hundreds of persistent volumes with data that powers both their internal development applications as well as their external-facing customer applications, and they protect all of their volumes with Portworx.
Their commitment to protecting their critical data proved to be extremely valuable when an administrator accidentally triggered a command that deleted all of their Portworx application volumes on a cluster. This deletion caused those applications to go offline. Although the telecommunications company runs both internal and external-facing applications on their Portworx volumes, the offline application directly affected their end users by interrupting key customer services.
Without a data protection solution in place, not only would this important data be lost, but the offline applications would have no quick road to recovery. This would have had disastrous consequences for their team. If the offline applications wouldn’t be able to recover, their customers may have experienced interrupted service for days or weeks. However, Portworx was able to easily recover all their backed up namespaces onto another cluster. All the team had left to do was restart their applications in the new cluster and it was back to business as usual—all within less than two hours of the initial delete command.
Scalable data protection with Portworx
Portworx also provided scalable data protection for this telecommunications company. Prior to adopting Portworx, their backup team would manually copy all their data from their primary location to their backup location. This was an involved process that included creating jobs that would create, copy, and dump the data from the volume into an S3 bucket every night.
For smaller Kubernetes workloads, this method would be serviceable. However, they are working at scale, with their developers constantly creating and deleting new volumes. The backup team was processing hundreds of volumes with no way to track incremental changes to the data. So, they would copy all of the data into the backup copies. Processing this amount of data would not only take much longer to backup, but it would also take up unnecessary space on their servers.
Portworx was able to offer scalable and self-service backups to the telecommunications company. Instead of creating individual jobs to copy data from new volumes, they are now able to backup all the volumes they need based on volume labels. All the developers need to do is label the volume upon its creation. Labeled volumes are automatically added to the daily backup schedules with no manual intervention. Further, any deleted volumes also have the label removed, so there are no additional backups made for volumes that are no longer in use.
The self-service backup has led to immense time savings for the backup team. Compared to their previous manual processes, Portworx cut the time for backups by multitudes. Further, incremental backups ensure that no unnecessary storage space is consumed in the backup location from copying everything over in its entirety every day.
Now, the team knows that any time they are running their backups and recovering their applications, it will be fast and reliable, allowing them to concentrate their efforts instead on providing the best possible customer experience. Learn more about Portworx data protection by checking out the Portworx website or join us for one of our Hands-On Labs.
- PWC, Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right
- CNN, The global tech outage showed how we’re just one mistake away from chaos
