STL has signed a significant deal with Dhamecha Group to roll out its multi-system IT platform to the wholesaler’s ninth depot, and to support its entire estate with STL’s cloud-based backup, business continuity and remote management service.
Reliable and scalable
A long-time STL client, Dhamecha’s depots run on STL’s merchandise management (STL MMS), sales order processing (STL SOP), handheld RF picking, and tilling and central cash solutions, all seamlessly integrated with the head office solution at Dhamecha’s Wembley headquarters.
Dhamecha trusts STL for solutions that are as scalable as they are robust.
Pradip Dhamecha, the company’s CEO, said,
‘STL’s systems are rich in functionality and seamlessly integrated, yet easy to extend. We know we can rely on them to help us continue to deliver our customer-centric strategy of competitive pricing, excellent product availability and first-class customer-service – even as we expand further afield.’
Dhamecha also likes the power of the head office solution. Mr Dhamecha said,
‘Our decision-making has been greatly facilitated by the cross-organisational visibility and drill-down querying capability provided by our centralised STL solution.’
Continuing business in the cloud
However, Dhamecha recognised that this IT dependence was also a potential vulnerability. It had been using a file-based cloud backup service for its key business systems, but this still depended on some in-house manual intervention.
Pradip Dhamecha, the company’s CEO, said,
‘IT is the engine of our business, and we need to know it will keep us motoring 24×7, no matter what.’
The company turned to STL for a more reassuring solution.
STL’s cloud-based backup, recovery and monitoring service
In response, STL provided Dhamecha with a suite of services that uses the latest in secure cloud-based technology. It incorporates:
Data backup & recovery
- Data from Dhamecha’s key business systems will automatically be replicated as a mirror image every 15 minutes onto a secure Network Attached Storage (NAS) system on its premises. This eliminates human error, the most common cause of backup failure
- This data will then automatically trickle via a protected Internet connection to a remote datacentre for high-security storage. If Dhamecha’s on-premises server should fail, STL will be able to recover the company’s historical data from this facility to enter onto its new or repaired server, enabling it to return to full operational activity quickly, with minimum headache.
- Dhamecha’s data will also be fed to a high-performance Backup Disaster Recovery (BDR) unit
- Should Dhamecha’s server fail, Dhamecha can immediately switch to the BDR and continue trading, using all supported business systems in full while the problem with its primary server is resolved
- STL provides daily checks to ensure all systems are backed up according to agreed schedules
- Further, the servers automatically provide regular status reports, eg on disk and memory usage, and real-time alerts on brewing problems, enabling STL to pre-empt issues before they threaten trading.
- By remotely monitoring for vulnerabilities, and confirming the successful installation of updates and security patches, STL ensures Dhamecha’s IT defences are always up-to-date.
- Elimination of human error
- Lower cost-of-ownership
- Improved reliability
- Better data protection
- Faster recovery options
- Updated with latest tech advances
- Improved scalability
Continuous trading
Remote server monitoring
Software security/anti-virus management
The age of cloud computing
Ivan Durkin, Managing Director of STL, said,
‘Cloud-based computing has come of age. Internet speeds and access techniques or costs are no longer the barrier they once were. And the benefits are significant – not least because cloud service providers invest in far superior hardware and security solutions than the average non-IT business can afford to do, which means that disruptive failures and security attacks are far less likely in the first place.
‘However, if a problem does occur, the dedicated service teams will typically have identified and fixed it before the customer even knew it was there.’
Benefits of cloud-based solutions: