Cerulean Datavault Application

1. The Brief

Cerulean are a full service information technology (IT) company who provide a range of IT services. One of core services Cerulean provide is online data backup and recovery, which gives their clients a secure and cost effective way of backing up data remotely. Clients where kept up to date regarding their account via a daily high level management report which outlined details such as last successful backup date, current quota used and also their current retention policy. Each client received their own individual report and these where generated manually by Cerulean support staff who would collaborate all the information into one document before emailing.

As the data backup client base grew the time taken to manually create these reports for each customer also increased taking staff members away from their help desk responsibilities. Cerulean approached us to implement a system that would take the raw data outputted by their system and create a simple application that would allow them to manage the process of creating the individual reports for customers and attaching them to emails as a PDFs (Portable Document Format).

2. The Solution

We reviewed the data being outputted by system and created a data export and inport routine that would allow us to populate an intermediary database to hold the data locally to the application. We then created a very simple web based system that gave help desk staff members the ability to link individual client machines to main client accounts and produce global reports for client management staff that required a high level overview of their data backup usage.

To facilitate easy report management, we built into the web interface features that allowed client reports to be generated (as a PDF) individually. In addition, we also implemented routines that allowed help desk staff to quickly send reports via email to clients individually or as a group based on selection.

3. The Result

Cerulean are now able to generate client reports at the click of a button, meaning help desk staff are no longer wasting hours of their day producing data backup summary reports. The system is simple, intuitive and ensures that help desk staff are helping their clients and not sat generating reports.