Executive Summary

Dentius has been relying on Macrium backup and imaging technology since 2016. All licenses are deployed and managed by Macrium Site Manager and MultiSite. Macrium has asked John Du Preez, the IT Manager of Dentius, to share their story why they chose Macrium over other solutions.

Challenges

Dentius has dental practices all around Belgium. As the company has been growing and opening new sites, the ability to manage all locations and have a “single pane of glass” became a challenge.

Before discovering Macrium, Dentius was using several different solutions at the same time to cover their needs. “The idea is that every dental practice, in general, knows that they need to backup, but that has been interpreted in multiple ways. Generally speaking, as we incorporate the new practices in our group, I found that we were running various solutions for backing-up. That could be anything from an application that was completely over-the-top for the current needs, or it could be a home-based solution that I thought was not adequate.”

The challenge was to consolidate all the needs in one solution, not just having the same tool installed on all workstations, but also to have all sites connected to a central management tool. “The first challenge was to find something that really brought us all together and started to consolidate our practices in terms of backing-up. It was important for us was to be able to monitor and keep on eye on the practices.”

Scalability and automation of the process are essential for any growing company. “Before starting to use Macrium, it was a very manual process; I would have to run through practice to practice to see their status and to make sure everything was okay. As we continue to grow, that became a scaling issue. We got to the point that we needed something more scalable and manageable, and frankly something that was also more consistent.”

“I am fantastically excited about this solution. I think that works well, we have good communication with Macrium, we get support whenever we need it”

John Du Preez – Dentius

How did Macrium help?

Macrium Site Manager and MultiSite helped Dentius to address their critical challenges – scalability and an ability to control and monitor all backup installations.

“As we added new practices, the hope was to have a standardised approach and that we could simplify the solution, and we could install in a standardised way. Incorporate a single dashboard, so we can keep one eye on a centralised space. That is why we came to Macrium.”

The Site Manager dashboard is customisable, enabling you to prioritise the display of relevant metrics and alerts. This makes it easier to spot failing backups and provides an administrator with the tools to identify problems. Backup definitions are easy to create as well as, assigning schedules and retention policies, and manage backup repositories. It includes comprehensive event management, alerts and security logging. The architecture leverages commonly used Microsoft Windows technologies and requires no specialist skills to install and configure.

Macrium MultiSite addresses the scaling issue and allows Dentius to plan the expansion of the operations. “The selling point was MultiSite; I think we had already invested in Macrium before that point anyway, but I thought MultiSite is something that fitted our long-term vision as well.”

This platform is a cloud-based solution, and it is very simple

and quick to directly connect to a Site Manager instance from within the management console enabling a single point of administration and reporting for all your Site Manager installations. There is no limitation in the number

of installations that you can control with MultiSite. Moreover, you can see everything at a glance, with rolled-up reporting, alerts, and an easy to use backup management tool.

“MultiSite was absolutely the most fundamentally important aspect of the software as a whole. I interact with it daily and it allows me to organise a really dispersed group of practices all across Belgium (and soon across France and Germany as well). We were struggling to manage the geographical dispersion, and now with the use of MultiSite it has become something that is scalable and manageable. It is great value for me; by far the most valuable aspect of Reflect.”

Results

As a result, Dentius implement the strategy of use Macrium Reflect every day. “We backup every night, we do a full backup on the weekends and differentials for the rest of the week.”

“You don’t need a (University) degree to be able to use it”