Disaster-Proofing a Global CGI Studio in the Cloud

This client isn’t your typical architecture studio. They don’t pour concrete or draw floorplans: they bring unbuilt spaces to life through cinematic CGI, immersive animation, and VR experiences that make you feel like you’ve already walked through the building.

Their team of 50–100 creative technologists is spread internationally, collaborating on tight deadlines and huge file sets. When your work depends on rendering accuracy down to the millimetre, and delivering it fast, your infrastructure has to work just as hard as your artists do.

Industry: Architecture Visualisation

Organisation Size: 50-100 employees

Service Areas: Business Continuity as a Service, Managed Services (Datacentre), Professional Services, Private Cloud Migration.

For this studio, technology has always been more than just infrastructure; it’s a creative enabler. As a tech-first business pushing the boundaries of architectural visualisation, staying ahead of the curve wasn’t just a goal: it was an expectation.

However, after several years of rapid global growth, the leadership team began to see business continuity in a new light: not just as a "nice to have", but as a mission-critical capability. With teams spread across multiple time zones and massive volumes of live and archived data in play, the cost of downtime (even a short one) would be measured in more than just hours lost.

They began exploring options: should continuity live in Azure? In a UK-based private cloud? Could Amazon EC2 offer a hot or cold replica strategy that fit the scale of their data footprint?

Each option raised more questions. With 100TB of live production data, 200TB in archives, and nearly 2TB of changes each month, the solution needed to be both technically sound and financially sustainable. And above all, it had to deliver speed, security, and simplicity... without overwhelming the teams that relied on it.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, we started by building on infrastructure the business had already invested in — their recently upgraded production servers. From there, we designed a resilient, centralised continuity solution built to scale with the studio’s global operations.

Here’s how the setup came together:

• Full Infrastructure Replication: Every critical server, including file servers, application servers, and domain controllers, was replicated to a dedicated primary datacentre. This gave the business a complete live mirror of its production environment, ready to take over if needed.
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• Secure, Encrypted Replication: Using a combination of Veeam Cloud Connect and VMware replication, all data was securely encrypted and scanned for ransomware before being replicated to the primary failover site.
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• Air-Gapped Backup and End User Compute: At a separate failover location, we established a fully isolated (air-gapped) backup solution. This site was also equipped with compute capacity to support end users in the event of a major incident.
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• Routine DR Testing: We embedded regular continuity drills, run twice a year, to stress-test the setup and ensure it could deliver when it mattered most.
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• 10Gb Network Uplift: To reduce replication lag and increase resilience, we upgraded the primary failover site with 10Gb cross-connectivity between storage and servers, dramatically improving sync times over their MPLS network.

The result was a tightly integrated, rigorously tested business continuity framework, one that felt invisible in day-to-day operations, but could switch on instantly if the worst ever happened.

The studio now runs with the confidence of knowing their entire production environment has a live replica: ready to take over instantly if the main site ever goes down.

All core virtual servers are mirrored at a dedicated datacentre, meaning the team can switch to backup infrastructure without skipping a beat. And if workstations ever become inaccessible, the business can immediately equip around 30% of senior staff with high-spec physical machines that match their daily setup.

They’ve also gained elastic recovery capability through Azure Virtual Desktop, allowing them to scale cloud-based access as needed, even in unexpected scenarios.

With the new setup in place, the studio has fully embraced cloud operations. The result? More agility, more confidence, and a team empowered to do their best creative work, with no fear of downtime.