SUE adopts GitProtect.io backups for the GitLab environment to guarantee its Disaster Recovery

SUE is one of the largest organizations that provides Cloud Native Solutions in Europe. With about 25 years of experience and over 100 certified experts, SUE ensures its customers always benefit from the company’s Consultancy, Professional Services, and Managed Services. Among its customers, there are such heavyweights as BMW, Toyota, Liberty Global, ING Group, Booking.com, NXP, Euronet, Thales, and many other industry giants that SUE has helped to seamlessly merge business apps and their companies’ processes in the cloud.

In this Case Study edition let’s look at SUE, a leader in Cloud Native Technologies aimed at enabling companies to fully leverage the Cloud, and its way of implementing GitProtect.io backups for its code repository ecosystem to enhance the company’s DevOps data management, security, and resilience.

SUE - A leader in Cloud Native technologies and solutions

Being one of the most renowned cloud-native managed services, solutions, and platform providers, SUE helps its customers design, build, support, manage, and improve their IT infrastructure. The company aims to optimize its customers’ business processes and increase efficiency with technologies like Containerization and Infra-as-Code.

With Sue’s MultiStax, a Cloud Native Application Delivery and Management Platform, their customers can migrate, deploy, operate, and manage their infrastructure and applications seamlessly in AWS, Google Cloud & Azure. Allowing them to innovate faster, operate smarter & optimize costs. “It is our goal to provide organizations with a spotless cloud journey, without wasting valuable time and reducing process steps” is stated on the SUE’s main page.

How Cloud Native technologies and solutions are born

Technology isn’t just a profession for SUE’s team, it’s their passion. To meet its customers’ needs and develop its Infra-as-Code solution, SUE’s R&D department relies on advanced systems for code management and CI/CD pipeline in its DevOps environment. Its development team’s structure comprises cross-functional units that collaborate seamlessly. This collaboration has allowed the company to effectively manage security and compliance throughout its CI/CD processes and run its robust DevOps infrastructure with no major hurdles.

However, understanding the importance of its work and the values it brings to its customers, the Cloud Native company made a strategic decision to implement a DevOps data backup solution to enhance its control over the codebase and ensure the ability to recover crucial data when needed.

The backup journey starts...

Before implementing GitProtect.io, SUE relied on a previous backup mechanism as its main method for safeguarding repositories and metadata. Although the previous backup system was convenient, it had its limitations.

Acknowledging this initial challenge and recognizing the necessity for a more comprehensive backup and restoration solution for its codebase, SUE began searching for an improved alternative.

SUE and GitProtect.io finally met

Among the various backup options available, which are mostly manual backup solutions, GitProtect.io stood out as the first and most promising candidate. GitProtect.io’s unique, comprehensive, and robust features have flawlessly aligned with SUE’s specific needs.

“GitProtect’s point-in-time recovery capabilities and its ability to seamlessly restore data across multiple platforms played a pivotal role in our decision-making process.” - says Kubilay Verboom, Cloud Engineer. SUE’s team understood that it would become a critical part of its DevOps data protection strategy, and it would only solidify the company’s commitment to GitProtect.io backup and restore services.

Zero-knowledge encryption

By implementing GitProtect.io, SUE got all its backups for code repositories and metadata encrypted in flight and at rest with an AES 256 encryption key. What’s more, SUE’s team can create its custom encryption key by providing its own string of characters to enforce its data security and maintain the confidentiality of the company’s sensitive information. Due to this and zero-knowledge infrastructure, even SUE’s device has no information about the encryption key, as it receives it only during the backup performance. Thus, no one but the key owner can decrypt the company’s critical backed-up data.

The powerful data encryption mechanisms employed by GitProtect.io are critical in shielding our backups from unauthorized access. With encryption in place, our data remains confidential and protected, even in the event of a breach.

Kubilay Verboom,Cloud Engineer

Access Management

Thanks to GitProtect.io management capabilities, SUE’s team can assign different roles and permissions to its team members - system administrator, backup operator, restore operator, or viewer. The most trustworthy team member can become a system administrator, who gets all the possible permissions starting from viewing and setting backup plans to restoring the data in the event of failure. On the other hand, SUE’s team can restrict some members of their team only to view the backup performance.

Thus, using such access roles and privileges SUE can effectively manage and regulate access to its backup data, ensuring that only authorized staff members can view or modify its backup and restore procedures.

Compliance support

When companies work in the Cloud, compliance is vital for legal, ethical, and operational reasons. It provides a framework for organizations to navigate their data protection, security, and regulatory requirements. Thus, it was highly important for SUE to find a backup solution that operates within strict security regulations - GitProtect.io is SOC 2 Type I and Type II, and ISO 27001 certified. Thus, SUE can be sure that its data backups stick to all relevant rules and security standards.

Moreover, by adopting GitProtect.io backups for its code repositories, the SUE’s team can easily monitor its company’s compliance within the Compliance Support section. The reports on backup performance, encryption, replication, SLA, and notifications are transparent and easily available from the main dashboard. Such monitoring allows SUE’s team to take instant actions if the need arises.

GitProtect’s support for compliance standards and regulations has simplified our adherence to industry standards and legal requirements.

Kubilay Verboom,Cloud Engineer

Improved Disaster Recovery planning

With GitProtect.io as part of its toolkit, SUE’s Disaster Recovery planning has become more robust. The company has become better prepared to handle unexpected events in any disaster scenario.

Thus, if the code repository experiences an outage, SUE can quickly restore its data as a file to its local instance, or opt for cross-over recovery and restore its critical codebase to another git hosting service providers. “We’ve utilized this feature when migrating data or during scenarios where platform versatility is essential.” - states Kubilay Verboom. In this case, the ability to restore data across various platforms has proven invaluable in maintaining the company’s operational continuity.

On the other hand, in case of an error, ransomware attack, or any other critical incident, SUE can use the backup solution’s point-in-time recovery and instantly roll back to a specific moment in time, ensuring data integrity and minimizing disruptions to its DevOps workflow.

Conclusion

GitProtect.io has transformed SUE’s backup strategy, delivering tangible and valuable results. Robust data encryption has significantly enhanced data security and confidentiality, providing peace of mind. Access control has added an extra layer of security, safeguarding SUE’s backup data. GitProtect.io’s support for compliance standards has simplified the company’s adherence to regulations, reducing compliance-related challenges.

Our data recovery process is now highly precise, minimizing downtime and data loss during incidents. We can smoothly transition data across platforms, ensuring business continuity even in unexpected scenarios.

Kubilay Verboom,Cloud Engineer

The overall outcome of adopting GitProtect.io backups for code repositories perfectly aligned with SUE’s needs, offering improved data integrity, security, flexibility, and compliance.