i-charging unlocks resilient, efficient storage with Vawlt

Vue d'ensemble 

When your business is growing as fast as i-charging—a Portuguese EV-charging innovator expanding across Europe and beyond—data becomes both a differentiator and a risk. Engineering simulations generate heavy outputs, production systems stream operational logs around the clock, and backups must be reliable in the worst moments, not just the best. i-charging set out to strengthen resilience, keep costs predictable, and avoid dependency on any single cloud—without slowing teams down.

They chose Vawlt’s Supercloud storage to underpin three critical workloads:

1.  Backup offsite, immutable backup repository, et
2.  file store for growing production logs and simulation data from Thermal Engineering Workflows.
3. Immutable storage of the photographic record of production

The Challenge: Hyper-Growth Meets Real-World Resilience

As i-charging scaled across Europe and beyond, data volumes surged from two fronts:

1. Operational systems continuously producing high-frequency production logs;
2. Engineering workflows generating large simulation outputs that must be retained, compared, and re-used.
   
   

This growth surfaced four practical challenges:

• True Resilience, Not Just Replication: Geo-replication within a single cloud doesn’t protect against provider-level incidents, misconfigurations, or account-level failures. i-charging wanted cloud-scale fault tolerance et independence from any single vendor.
• Security & Sovereignty by Default: Data had to be zero-knowledge encrypted, immutable where needed, and kept within customer-defined jurisdictions. The team wanted guarantees that only they could access file contents, not a provider or third party.
• Cost Predictability at Scale: With data growing quickly, the business required pre-defined, transparent pricing et operational efficiency—no surprise egress charges or hidden operational fees.
• Speed Without Complexity: Backups should be effortless and recoverable fast. Engineering teams needed a simple, high-throughput repository for logs and simulations—without managing multiple clouds, storage classes, or migration projects.
  
  

Vawlt appeared as a natural fit. As the customer put it:”The comfort of knowing our data is securely encrypted and distributed across multiple clouds was key for us. We want independence and business continuity—even in worst-case scenarios.”

 

The Solution Architecture: One Supercloud, Two Critical Workloads

Vawlt was deployed as a lightweight software agent that exposes virtual filesystem or S3 endpoints to existing tools. Data flows directly between i-charging and the underlying clouds, so live operations continue even if cloud services are offline.

It covers the two main use-cases they were looking for a solution:

1) Immutable Offsite Repository for Backups

• Drop-in target —no re-architecture.

• Policy-based immutability: backups become non-erasable/non-modifiable during a defined window.

• Erasure-coded, multi-cloud distribution: data is encrypted, fragmented, and spread across clouds and locations chosen by i-charging. Loss or corruption in any single provider/region does not prevent restoration.

• Predictable billing: pre-defined and efficient per-volume pricing avoids surprise egress/ops fees.
  
  

2) Unified Storage for Production Logs, Simulation Data from Thermal Engineering Workflows

• Presented as a filesystem, so pipelines and tools connect natively.

• Performance accelerators: local caching, prefetching, and parallel I/O to speed daily ingest and analysis.

• Continuous snapshotting: system-wide rollbacks to clean points-in-time.

• Chiffrement “zero-knowledge” + integrity/authenticity checks across all stored data.

• Lifecycle control: easily adapt placement and retention without disruptive migrations.
  
  

3) Immutable storage of the photographic record of production

• Presented as a filesystem

• Immutable policy set to make files immediately immutable once closed.

• Chiffrement “zero-knowledge” + integrity/authenticity checks across all stored data.

 

Under the hood, Vawlt’s erasure coding (think RAID-at-cloud-scale) allows data reconstruction even if a provider fails or corrupts content. Combined with multi-cloud distribution et immutability, i-charging gains end-to-end protection—from cyber incidents to provider outages—while keeping day-to-day operations fast and simple.

Outcomes & Benefits

• Security and Independence by Design: Multi-cloud distribution, zero-knowledge encryption, and immutable backups turn “we hope the provider is up” into “we can recover regardless.” Sovereignty is maintained; lock-in is avoided.

• Performance & Cost Wins: Engineering teams push and pull data faster; finance sees fewer surprises. Citing João Prudente from i-charging:“Compared with other solutions we evaluated, we experienced 30% better performance on data movement, and 50% cost savings.”

• Operational Simplicity & Speed: One control plane to define volumes, policies, and monitoring. Native integrations keep workflows unchanged. Deployment measured in hours, not weeks.

• Future-Proofing Without Migrations: As needs evolve, transparent cloud switching lets i-charging rebalance for cost, performance, or compliance—no downtime, no re-plumbing of tools, and no big-bang moves.

Conclusion

i-charging secured a future-proof data foundation—immutable backups, sovereign multi-cloud resilience, and faster, cheaper day-to-day operations—without disrupting teams or tooling. The result is operational confidence at scale: backups recover when needed, engineering moves faster, and costs stay under control.

 

Ready to modernize your backup and archive strategy—without adding complexity?

Let’s talk about a quick pilot or tailored demo for your environment.

👉 Book a demo  or Contact us: info@vawlt.io