The customer is King

Juno Records is the world’s largest online dance music store. Based in London, its website was launched in March 1996, and has since built a reputation as the most comprehensive source for new and back catalogue dance music. The website, now offers more than 700 new releases each week, and has in excess of 62,000 titles in stock.

The company aims is to provide the best service, delivery times and customer support on the web. As an online business, having its entire technical infrastructure functioning 24/7 is critical to enable it to fulfill its customer promise of same-day order dispatch and rapid response to customer enquiries, be it via telephone, the web or email.

A worry-free environment

Until recently, Juno Records did not have a formalised data backup strategy, but instead undertook ad-hoc data backup using traditional tape. However, with the company having grown to over 75 employees, and the electronic data burden continuously increasing, Juno Records’ Technical Director, Ben Yarwood, realised that a strategic, low-maintenance data backup solution was critical to ensure both business efficiency and continuity.

Being an online business, Juno felt secure online backup would offer the best value. It chose Databarracks (www.databarracks.com), as it wanted a cost-competitive data backup solution that was adaptable and scalable to meet the evolving needs of its business.

In addition, the level of security offered by the solution was of utmost importance as the information backed-up is business critical and highly sensitive. It includes corporate documentation such as financial information, intellectual copyright material worth over £1 million, as well as a database which hosts all customer information, order history and product information data.

“We have designed and built our own bespoke systems which control the entire company from the stock ordering process all the way through to dispatch. We store all the information from these systems in our databases. This is the business-critical data, without which we would be out of business,” comments Yarwood.

Juno Records was also very mindful of its responsibility towards customers, whose personal identifiable information they must protect at all costs. With this in mind, traditional tape-based technology was not suitable as it can leave an organisation open the threat of physical theft. In addition, encryption on tapes takes much longer to complete, and can take up to 30 per cent more time than comparable unencrypted backup.

“When I initially reviewed Databarracks’ offering, there was no doubt that online backup was the ideal solution for our requirement, not just from its ease of use, but also from the business critical security perspective. Security is intrinsic to the solution – right from data encryption of our databases to the physical security of Databarracks’ data centres. Since deploying this solution, security of our data is no longer a cause of concern for me. It’s a great situation to be in,” adds Yarwood.

Technology at its best

With the solution having been live for three years, Databarracks now manages all of Juno’s daily backups of up to six gigabytes of data, including accounts, correspondence, critical documents and its bespoke systems database. Backing-up only new data or data that has been changed, Databarracks provides great savings to Juno. Using traditional tape technology, Juno would have to backup 125GB of data each day, at an approximate cost of £10,000 for tapes alone. Add to this the capital investment needed to buy tape drives and libraries, as well as the cost of Juno employees safely transporting the tapes to a remote location, and secure online backup was clearly a more cost-effective and efficient option.

Yarwood concludes, “It’s absolutely wonderful. We have never had any problems with it. If there is a reporting error, a Databarracks employee is quick to get on the phone to inform us and solve the problem. The solution is also very straightforward to use - we do on occasion restore information, which can be dealt with quickly and easily. And given that exceptional customer service is our key differentiator, knowing that in case of system failure our whole data infrastructure can be up and running again within around 12 hours is a great comfort.

“Technology is at its most useful when it works at all times and you don’t ever have to think about it. Databarracks’ solution falls into this category. As a result, it frees up my time, enabling me to focus on things that need the human touch, such as further developing our website to provide an even better customer experience. The technology is truly scalable and future-proof. I am confident that it will be supporting Juno Records for years to come.”