Shurgard improves disaster recovery capabilities with Colt’s colocation services

Colt has helped Shurgard to reduce its data centre footprint and improve its disaster recovery capabilities by migrating its infrastructure to Colt’s highly secure and advanced carrier neutral data centre in Roosendaal, the Netherlands. With the upgrade of its secondary colocation site, the self-storage market leader has reduced the number of racks it requires by 40%, saved on annual data centre costs and cut travel time between the two data centre locations by 30%, while optimising the availability of business critical applications for their 500 employees that work across 189 storage locations in Europe.

To support its European operation, Shurgard hosts its business critical applications in the Colt carrier neutral data centre in Nossegem, Belgium. With business critical applications holding customer data located centrally, the availability of Shurgard’s data centre environment is critical to ensure maximum customer service levels. Shurgard analysed its disaster recovery capabilities and decided that an upgrade of its data centre disaster recovery capabilities would deliver multiple customer and business benefits.

“When our employees cannot access the systems and data held centrally, we need to switch to manual processes, such as processing reservations on paper. New and updated customer information then needs to be saved in the central CRM system when the systems come back online, doubling the workload and reducing staff productivity significantly,” says Dany Bruggeman, IT and Project Director at Shurgard. “With our second data centre location becoming more critical to the overall business continuity plan, we were looking for a data centre that could meet the same high standards as the Nossegem location and was closer to our European head office in Belgium.”

As the European self-storage market leader was already familiar with Colt’s colocation service, Shurgard looked at the award winning data centre in Roosendaal. The decision to move to this facility was simple. The Colt data centre in Roosendaal ticked all boxes: capabilities to use space efficiently, Colt’s tier 3+ classification for high availability, supported with superior security levels through ISO 27001 certification. Shurgard and Colt worked closely together to make the physical move of the IT equipment from Rotterdam to Roosendaal as swift and smooth as possible. In addition to setting up a project plan, Colt took care of the design, testing and on-site support at the Roosendaal data centre.

“Colt’s project management capabilities, and their experience in supporting customers with moving IT infrastructure, really helped to make the migration straight forward and hassle-free. We had our IT systems up and running in two days in our new Colt data centre,” states Bruggeman. “We now have a fully-fledged active-active data centre environment and have significantly upgraded our second data centre without increasing the overall costs. The flexibility of both Colt data centres will enable us to quickly and cost effectively adapt to our constantly evolving needs, supporting our business growth, as well as our plans for desktop virtualisation and transferring more applications into the Cloud.”

Mark Ryder, VP of Sales, UK & I at Colt: “Colt has played a key role in Shurgard’s IT, communications and network strategy, enabling the IT team to drive cost savings, increase sales performance and improve service levels, while also ensuring business continuity. This is a great example of how we work with our customers to continue to meet the challenges of delivering more with less, and demonstrating real value to the business”.