Lightedge Strengthens Data Resilience with Backup & Recover.

Lightedge is a leading provider of secure, compliant hybrid IT infrastructure solutions. With over 30 years of experience, the company specializes in delivering tailored cloud, colocation, and managed services to organizations across various industries, including finance, healthcare, retail, and manufacturing.

Lightedge is in the midst of a sweeping transformation. Since private equity firm GI Partners acquired Lightedge in 2021, the organization has evolved into a growth platform, modernizing their back-end systems, upgrading project and change management workflows, and expanding its geographic and operational footprint.

To support this growth, the company has embraced scalable, enterprise-grade solutions, including Salesforce, to streamline operations while maintaining rigorous compliance and data protection standards.

With around 1,300 clients in heavily regulated industries such as healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and technology, Lightedge has long differentiated itself through how it builds and operates data centers and the managed services it provides.

That service layer touches vast volumes of client data. “There are astronomical numbers of people hosted on our platform,” Lightedge CIO and CSO Michael Hannan says. “Just in the finance sector, some clients support millions of end customers. The amount of data and number of people touched are pretty staggering.”

The team recognized that the data stored in Salesforce was mission-critical to their business—driving everything from customer engagement to daily operations. While Salesforce offers strong platform-level safeguards, the Lightedge team understood that if data were accidentally deleted or corrupted, they had no reliable way to restore it. To ensure the resilience and recoverability of their most valuable information, investing in a more proactive, purpose-built backup solution became a clear priority.

“We were trusting that our hosting partners were resilient and that their core processing was enough,” Lightedge CIO and CSO Michael Hannan explains. “We just had 24-hour snapshot backups—no granularity at all. Obviously, that's not a safe way to do business.”

The transformation began when a previous team member, frustrated with the complexity of restoring records, championed Salesforce as the foundation for better backup, recovery, and operational continuity.

While Lightedge thankfully never suffered an actual disaster, Michael says that the company has conducted readiness exercises with external auditors to comply with ISO 22301 for business continuity and disaster recovery. “That required us to perform a much more detailed business impact assessment on all of our core systems,” he clarifies.

Lightedge hosted live data and had multiple redundancies and air gap solutions for retention of that data. However, in the back office, Michael admits that “there wasn't much of a thought process around disaster recovery and business continuity.” And while it was technically possible to recover data, doing so required a manual, labor-intensive process that wasn’t sustainable, especially as the business scaled.

That manual effort wasn’t just inefficient; it could be costly. With Salesforce’s Backup & Recover capabilities, Lightedge has saved weeks, if not months, of effort by enabling granular, record-level recovery instead of having to restore entire datasets. This shift has dramatically improved recovery speed and reduced resource strain across the business.

Now Lightedge can stay focused on more strategic growth initiatives—with fewer worries about data loss or recovery. Salesforce helps Lightedge ensure end-to-end protection, control, and recoverability across critical sales data and internal service workflows, while eliminating the need for time-consuming manual exports or imprecise mass restores. The team can quickly locate and restore exactly what’s needed—whether it’s a single record, a specific data object, or data tied to a compliance request. This not only improves precision, but also drastically reduces downtime and resource strain.

Lightedge explored off-the-shelf solutions to eliminate the need for managing backups through their own internal platforms. Backup & Recover stood out for its automated protection and ability to deliver fast, reliable recovery without added infrastructure or complexity—making it the ideal fit for their security-first approach.

Today, Salesforce supports a wide range of processes for Lightedge, including:

• Account creation and opportunity management
• Quoting and pipeline management
• Support ticketing and customer service workflows
• Configuration management and infrastructure visibility
• Billing system transitions and reporting

Much of this data is dynamic, interdependent, and regulated. “If we lost that data, we wouldn’t just be redoing manual work—we’d be losing critical insights, audit trails, and system configurations that took weeks or months to build,” says Michael. “It would set us back in ways that go far beyond time.”

Salesforce plays a vital role in creating a reliable and compliant foundation for Lightedge’s growth and customer service. “These platforms are integral to our growth plan and data processing,” Michael adds.

Salesforce now plays a central role in Lightedge’s data resilience and IT efficiency strategy. Here’s why:

• Granular recovery gives Lightedge the ability to restore individual records, without the need to perform a full backup restore.
• Peace of mind with a solution that’s always ready when needed, yet requires minimal day-to-day management.
• A critical safety net for Salesforce data, enabling Lightedge to quickly roll back minor errors before they create larger operational impacts.

As a colocation and cloud services provider, backups are a core part of the business which is why Backup & Recover has proven invaluable—eliminating a major concern in an environment where there are already plenty of others to manage.

“GI Partners’ investments into these underlying platforms to help support our growth is great,” Michael says. “We don't have to rely on homegrown, lightly-supported platforms—we've invested in the best and that includes Salesforce.”

The Results

• Lightedge saved weeks, if not months, of effort by enabling granular record-level recovery instead of full dataset restores.
• Data recovery is now fast and precise, minimizing downtime and business disruption.
• Improved audit readiness with faster, more precise access to historical data—supporting compliance with ISO 22301 and other regulatory frameworks without burdening internal teams.
• Increased confidence in business continuity planning, with a reliable, tested backup and recovery solution that supports growth and minimizes risk.