If you have passed a car transporter carrying shiny new vehicles, there is a good chance it belongs to The Car Distribution Group (CDG).

The Auckland-based company, and its subsidiaries Car Haulaways, Auckland Vehicle Deliveries Ltd, and Nationwide Transport, store and transport more than 200,000 each year all over New Zealand for many of the largest car brands.

It is an increasingly data-driven business as CDG seeks to make the process of delivering all those cars as safe and efficient as possible.

“We have around 120 trucks on the roads,” says Kirill Makarov, CDG’s senior systems engineer.

“We are in the process of upgrading the digital systems on those trucks to monitor things like mileage and driver behaviour to give us more insights into our business."

Data backup as a service (BaaS)

The data sent back to head office from all of those transporters will feed into analytics platforms before being backed up with the Veritas SaaS (software as a service) Backup (VSB) solution.

CDG called on Datacom to help integrate the automated cloud-based backup solution from industry leader Veritas. The data generated in Microsoft Office 365 applications by CDG’s office workers, dispatchers, and workshop mechanics is now all backed up to VSB.

Previously, CDG did manual backups directly to its own server, hosted by us.

“We had terabytes of backed-up data sitting on our server, which was costing us money from a hardware perspective,” says Kirill.

With Veritas SaaS Backup, CDG enjoys unlimited storage and data retention, with a per-user subscription-based model giving it the flexibility to scale backup capacity as the business grows.

“It’s the simplicity of it that really appeals,” Kirill says.

“You do the backups whenever you want and as regularly as you want.”

Easier access

The move to Veritas makes it easier for CDG to meet its data retention policies and has also made the process of accessing backed-up data easier.

“I had someone last week who had deleted an email but really needed to access the information in it,” explains Kirill.

“Outlook does a back up of emails, but it's a bit clunky to use and Microsoft applies its own formatting to it. All of those emails were saved by Veritas. It just took a search and we had the email we needed. Veritas will provide the data in any format you want.”

Turning to Datacom for a backup solution was an easy decision, he adds.

“We knew and trusted Datacom having worked with them as our hosting partner. I had conversations with Datacom and Veritas and within a couple of hours, I felt like an expert in data backups. They provided great service.”

Seeking simplicity

With the pandemic hitting tourism hard, resulting in port closures and fewer hire cars being delivered around the country, it has been a challenging year for CDG. But, the company is looking to the future, where data is delivered from every single truck, informs CDG’s business intelligence, and is then securely backed up for later use.

Data analytics and reporting is the next step,” says Kirill. “From our financial accounts to the data coming in off the trucks, everything will eventually be backed up to Veritas. That’s the simplicity we’ve been seeking.”

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