Groupe La Centrale is a specialized group in the automobile marketplace. Its core business includes selling used cars (La Centrale), buying used cars (MaVoitureCash), selling new vehicles (Promoneuve), and publishing automotive-related editorial content (Caradisiac and Forum Auto).
Their story began in 1969 with the birth of the Centrale des Particuliers, the first paper medium for connecting sellers and buyers of vehicles. Today, their adventure continues with a 100% digital business model. Receiving more than 48 million monthly visits, Groupe La Centrale is the French reference to buy, sell and get the maximum information available on vehicles. Its mission is to simplify and secure the car buying and selling experience. The heart of its strategy is to make the search easy, to provide all useful information on vehicles, and to add more transparency to the buying and selling process. Its strategic vision? Always be one step ahead!
The company’s CTO, Thomas Berger, explains, “Our vision is to simplify and secure the car buying and selling experience. The heart of our strategy is making the search easy, providing useful automotive news, and adding more trust and transparency to the process.”
True resilience
Together with Groupe La Centrale’s Deputy CTO, Nicolas Poulain, Berger oversees the company’s end-to-end IT strategy, including software development and cybersecurity. “From an information security perspective, one of our key goals was improving our resilience,” says Berger.
We knew that true resilience means always having an up-to-date backup in place for all the systems and data we rely on to run the business.
Thomas Berger, CTO, Groupe La Centrale
Cloud-based applications, Jira, Confluence, and GitHub, are three such business-critical assets. Groupe La Centrale’s product development teams extensively use Jira. Confluence is the company’s core process and procedures data repository, and GitHub houses the IT team’s code base.
Berger and Poulain knew that SaaS and cloud don’t necessarily mean safe and secure. Regulatory compliance with ISO standards was also a concern. They were also familiar with the Shared Responsibility Model applicable to SaaS platform providers and their customers. In this model, the cloud provider must operate a comprehensive backup program; however, these backups are not available to revert customer-initiated destructive changes, such as fields overwritten using scripts or deleted issues, projects, or sites. Buggy apps, rogue CSV files, and third-party integration issues are also often the culprits of unwelcome data loss and corruption disasters. A backup tool can also be a lifesaver if SaaS vendors experience unplanned hardware or software failures, power outages, or natural disasters that take their systems offline. Most SaaS vendors are upfront about the limitations of their liability in this regard. Consider these provisions included in GitHub’s terms of service:
“You understand and agree that we will not be liable to you or any third party for any loss of profits, use, goodwill, or data, or for any incidental, indirect, special, consequential, or exemplary damages, however arising, that result from:
- the use, disclosure, or display of your User-Generated Content;
- your use or inability to use the Service;
- any modification, price change, suspension, or discontinuance of the Service;
- the Service generally or the software or systems that make the Service available;
- unauthorized access to or alterations of your transmissions or data;
No application fatigue
Berger and Poulain sought a reliable third-party backup solution to protect their most critical SaaS data.
After doing our research, we selected Rewind because of the product’s high standards and the fact that Rewind provides multiple SaaS backups in one place. That eliminates application fatigue. We want our technical experts focused on innovation and ensuring the wheels of our business keep turning – not administrative tasks.
Nicolas Poulain, Deputy CTO, Groupe La Centrale
Rewind is built from the ground up with a “security first” ethos. As experts in data backups, security isn’t just a feature; it’s at the core of what Rewind does. Rewind is backed by Atlassian, the owners of Jira and Confluence. In fact, the Atlassian community team recommends that users invest in Rewind Backups on its community website:
“Use add-ons like Rewind Backups for Confluence, which allows you to automate your daily backups and data recovery for Confluence Cloud. Rewind backups include all items including spaces, pages, attachments, comments, blog posts, templates, and themes.”
Rewind Backups for Confluence, Rewind Backups for Jira, and Rewind Backups for GitHub allow users to automate their daily backups with easy access to 365 days of backup history with unlimited cloud storage for backups.
Berger and Poulain also liked the set-and-forget nature of Rewind Backups.
Once it was configured, there was little we needed to do, and if we ever need to perform a restore, we know we can do it at an item-level.
Nicolas Poulain, Deputy CTO, Groupe La Centrale
Since the Centrale team doesn’t need to perform the administrative and repetitive tasks of backup management, they’re free to focus on what they do best: connecting car buyers and sellers. They’re also safe in the knowledge that they’re not risking potential legal and compliance liabilities flowing from SaaS outages or data loss.
