Established in New Zealand in 1987, Würth NZ has become a staple of New Zealand's automotive, cargo, construction, engineering and wood trade sectors, offering a full range of tools, supplies and digital services. It employs more than 250 staff in New Zealand and has offices in Auckland, Christchurch, Mount Maunganui and Wellington.

Following a successful Cloudian deployment at Würth's sister company in Australia, the Würth NZ team brought Cloudian together with its trusted local partner, PB Tech. The team deployed Cloudian's HyperStore and Object Lock technology in Würth's Auckland data centres, combining it with Veaam's data protection technology.

Würth NZ IT manager Ricky Bright says the deployment has been a major uplift for Würth's resiliency in the event of a major server failure or data breach. While none have occurred, the company has tested a 40GB server failover and had the environment back up and running within 10 minutes.

"We now have the confidence to innovate and accelerate our growth ambitions because we're assured on our businesses resilience," said Bright. "We can trust our data backups will be there when we need them, and – importantly – we can quickly retrieve specific missing or deleted data instantly whenever a team member needs it."

Crucially, Cloudian's data immutability capabilities mean that even in the event of a ransomware attack, a backup copy of critical data remains inaccessible to cybercriminals. The deployment has also removed bandwidth congestion issues during backups, which had slowed down Würth's staff using its digital services. Cloudian's load balancer intelligently manages application traffic across the environment to provide optimal, consistent performance so backups can happen unnoticed.

"Data is critical, but unless you can access it when you need it, it may as well not exist," added Bright. "We've now got the right data runway and environment in place to capitalise on our automation drive and prepare for important trends such as AI that will have a major impact on the industry. We're walking before we run and building the competence to give us confidence in a more digitised industry."

"Legacy data storage and backup was never designed with cyber resilience or large-scale automation in mind," said Cloudian New Zealand, Asia Pacific and Japan senior director James Wright. "The days of using outdated technology to store, backup and retrieve your data are numbered. The economics don't add up at a time of mounting economic concerns combined with growing cybersecurity and data sovereignty requirements.

"Würth NZ has always understood the importance of efficiency and that's reflected in its sustained growth and modern IT environment. Ultimately, it means its team has the confidence to take on new trends as they emerge while keeping their data assets secure and accessible, and that's how you stay relevant in the digital world."

The Cloudian environment is supported by Veeam's data protection software and built on Nutanix hardware, with Cloudian holding technology partnerships with each for ease of integration between the platforms.