Zong enhances its customers’ data protection through Symantec’s first class backup appliances and software solutions

Wednesday, December 31 - 2014 @ 12:30 noon: Zong, the digital partner of the nation, announced that it has selected Symantec Netbackup Appliances and Software solution to enhance its customers’ data protection. Being One of the largest Telecom operator in Pakistan, Zong was looking for a robust, unified and scalable solution to deal with data expansion challenges and at the same time to achieve stringent RTO and RPOs.

Zong has been pioneering the transition to modern technological services and is the first and only operator in Pakistan to offer 4G services. The company holds more than 100 terabytes of business information, across 200+ servers over 3 data centers.

For the past few years, we have grown our subscriber base at a very high and consistent rate each year, Says Mr. Niaz A Malik, Chief Information Officer, Zong. In IT, we help to enable and support this growth by providing a steady foundation of efficiency and availability. This helps the business to grow and retain our subscribers’ base. Our vision is to become an indispensable digital life partner of our customers and we need strategic partners like Symantec to ensure stability of our products and services.

“Our subscriber base has grown at a very high and consistent rate over the past few years”, notes Niaz A Malik, Chief Information Officer at Zong. “We aim to provide our customers with efficiency and effectiveness of the highest level and this partnership with Microsoft will work a long way in ensuring

Commenting on the announcement, Mr. Ali Waqas, Director of Information Technology at Zong, said, “Following our strategy to enhance our operational efficiency, we are aiming to become one of the leading telecom service provider to offer the best IT solutions to enhance every customer’s experience. As the data deluge trend continues to impact the world, the deployment of such advanced backup solution will further support our promise to safeguard and govern critical business information.”

Mr. Muhammad Abdul Wajid, Director of Information Technology at Zong mentioned that we are facing exponential data growth hence decided to use NetBackup Data Protection Optimization to conserve storage space by deduplicating backup data. We’ll benefit from faster backups and replication, as well as reduced backup storage costs. Mr. Wajid and his team at Zong will significantly reduce the administration time spent to manage the enterprise backup by using Symantec’s solutions, relocating valuable human resource hours to meet other needs of the organization.

Wasim Iqbal, Territory Manager Pakistan at Symantec, added; “Zong has been at the forefront of how the telecom industry can utilize leading edge IT technologies. Symantec is one part of this vision. Netbackup delivers agile and scalable data recovery tools, which will enable Zong to optimize business operations for increased productivity. Information Protection and Security has been the top agenda of CIO’s across the Globe and Pakistan’s Telecom industry is no exception. Symantec’s suite of comprehensive solutions allows businesses, such as Zong, to manage & secure information, and remain one step ahead of industry in customer’s data protection and security. We are delighted to work with such a prestigious organization.”

Teamsun Technology, a leading system integrator in Pakistan will deliver the solution in collaboration with Symantec’s professional services team. For years, Zong used Symantec NetBackup software to back up data to tape. Although the solution performed well, the company wanted to enable faster backups and restores says Mr. Tony Ye, CEO of Teamsun Technology. Symantec’s Appliance based backup solution is a true one-window solution across data protection industry.

Abdul Samad, Symantec Portfolio Consultant, stated, “Netbackup software and Symantec purpose built backup appliances (PBBA) is recognized as the market leader in enterprise backup and recovery market, and will help Zong to protect the large data bases and complex data center applications. It also delivers breakthrough capabilities for virtualized systems that go well beyond what traditional backup practices can achieve.”