Benefits of Rewind
- Granular restore capabilities
- Redundancy of Confluence data on a separate server
- Automatic backup and restore capabilities
- Data residency in the European Union
- Straightforward installation
“The benefit of Rewind is that we can back up our data externally and easily integrate it into our Atlassian tools.”
Florian Polterauer, Head of IT at Global Rail Group
Florian Polterauer has been helping Global Rail Group migrate and modernize its cloud infrastructure for two years. As Head of IT, he doesn’t mince words about how vital their data is: “We are the Wikipedia of railway infrastructure.”
The company is a steward of all data relating to modern railway transportation, offering a suite of consulting services, training, portals and other products. Global Rail Group provides crucial knowledge to help manufacturers, transportation providers, and public institutions maintain, upgrade or develop new railway systems.
“We work with companies in Europe and North America, ranging from public urban railway organizations to private railway equipment manufacturers,” says Polterauer. “Say a railway provider wants to increase their speeds from 120 to 160 km/h; our experts and data can help them plan accordingly. We also help with everything from data analysis to maintenance strategies, so the quality of railway investments lasts as long as possible,”
Data security challenges
The organization’s cloud infrastructure was nonexistent when Florian joined Global Rail Group. Since 2022, they have meticulously evaluated and incorporated different tools to modernize their operations and centralize years of institutional knowledge.
With a distributed workforce of 70 people helping clients across multiple time zones, he knew investing in the cloud was the company’s only viable option for their success. The core applications they chose were Office 365, Confluence, and an ERP. Florian says Confluence quickly became their operating system, cataloging all existing information, new data and all vital documentation.
“Confluence is the heart of our organization. It contains all the knowledge that we collect and produce. Losing it would be a disaster. Years of knowledge are in Confluence, and it would all be gone.”
Florian Polterauer, Head of IT at Global Rail Group
Florian says that with such a strong reliance on the data stored in Confluence and now using Jira to manage projects, a few factors were driving the need for a backup.
First, they had already purchased backup and recovery software for other tools, a practice Florian carried over from other organizations. “I want to make sure we are double protected. I always want an external backup for cloud software, and additionally, from time to time, I back up the backup file.”
Florian also wanted to protect against the top cause of data loss in a cloud environment—individuals’ actions and mistakes. This could be someone deleting a space or topic in Confluence as they learn the tool or members of Global Rail Group leaving the organization and taking data with them. Global Rail Group needed to ensure a reliable backup of its intellectual property was always in place.
Finally, they wanted the ability to recover from cyber-attacks quickly. He says that even with strategies and barriers in place to keep out bad actors, it takes just one misstep for the wrong person to gain access. “We had an issue where someone got access to our web host passwords and was sending us DDoS attacks. You can try your best with multi-factor authentication, but at the end of the day, when you work in the cloud, your biggest threat is other people.”
As a knowledge-based service business and a major resource for the rail industry, Global Rail Group believes the loss of its essential data would be a catastrophe for both its business and clients. “It would be a disaster. There are years of knowledge in Confluence, and it would all be gone. We would not be able to help our customers.”
Florian says relying on Atlassian’s limited abilities to back up and recover data was too risky. Atlassian makes no guarantees to ensure user-generated data will always be accessible.
With an IT team of three people, Florian says building an in-house backup tool or using limited native solutions was a non-starter. “We have no time right now. We have other projects which are way more important. We don’t need to do everything by ourselves.” He preferred to find a trusted, reliable Backup-as-a-Service provider to ensure they had a redundancy of their knowledge base stored on a separate server from Atlassian’s.
Why Rewind?
Global Rail Group evaluated all the backup applications available in the Atlassian Marketplace. Florian says Rewind stood out immediately, as it had all the functionality he sought regarding granular restorations. Moreover, Rewind offered the ability to store data closer to their headquarters in Vienna, and he sensed that Rewind would provide a higher degree of reliability and security than other vendors.
“Rewind was the most professional tool we evaluated. Some free tools immediately turned me off. Rewind also offered more options for where we could store data. We wanted to store our data in Europe rather than North America. Rewind was also easy to install—it was essentially plug-and-play.”
Florian Polterauer, Head of IT at Global Rail Group
