Leading oil & gas public company case study for disaster recovery(DR) as a service

By: cloudxchange.io

Use case:

Disaster recovery as a service for leading Natural gas distribution company with application stack including custom monolithic & oracle enterprise applications on Windows and Linux platform with 30 TB of data.

Third party tools used :

• Double take disaster recovery.
• Third party monitoring using site 24 x 7.
• Incident management using fresh service.

Challenges and roadblocks :

As a public sector company, customer depends on,

• Constant availability of its back-end applications.
• Enterprise-level disaster recovery solution that could achieve rapid recovery while also meeting their budgetary requirements.
• FAR DR in a different seismic zone replacing their nearby secondary data center.
• Achieve enterprised-level disaster recovery within their
• Expand disaster recovery strategy to meet company’s quickly growing customer volumes.
• Failover to older point in time in cases of server corruptions or cyberattacks
• Failback to primary data center without disruption or data loss.

Proposed solution:

Disaster recovery as a service in AWS Mumbai Region.
Below would be the functional overview of the solution,

• Creation of Windows and Linux replication servers in the target region.
• Separate VPC will be configure for servers within AWS DC.
• AWS direct connect will be configured for private point to point connectivity for MPLS network.
• Double Take DR will be used for replication of server images from primary site to DR site.
• Double Take DR replicates entire server image including OS, Application & Data to destination server at DR site.
• All windows will be replicated to single windows server on AWS.
• Linux server will be replicated to single Linux server on AWS.
• Replication will be done in near real time.
  • Subsequently all incremental data will be replicated online using double take DR tool.

Logical architecture for double take :

Why amazon web services :

• Amazon web services is a pioneer in the field of open source technological integrations.
• Having multiple availability zones was a perfect fit.
• Customer needed to Reduced time to scale from months to minutes.
• Disaster-recovery capabilities and Improved uptime.
• Segregation of workloads into multiple accounts for additional layer of access management.

Third Party Tools Used :

Following services have been used in AWS cloud,

• Amazon Identity and access management.
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.
• Amazon Elastic Block Store.
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.
• AWS Simple Storage Service.
• AWS Cloudwatch and CloudTrail
• AWS Direct Connect.

The benefits & outcome :

• Quick and easy continuous replication of data center applications into AWS.
• On-demand disaster recovery solution that provisions servers only when disaster strikes.
• Sub-second recovery point objectives(RPOs) to be achieve.
• Recovery time objectives (RTO) of minutes.
• Granulates Point-in-time recovery.
• Primary AWS services used: Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, AWS Direct Connect.
• OS-level continuous replication of all overloads and applications.

About the Partner :

• cloudxchange.io is an Advanced consulting partner in Amazon web service (AWS) Partner network (APN).
• Our wide range of Cloud based offerings with comprehensive services and cost-effective approach will help you meet your technology and business objectives.
• cloudxchange.io Managed Services for public clouds delivers 24 x 7 monitoring and management services by experienced administrators who are experts in supporting public cloud environments. As an official technology partners with leading public cloud service providers, we provide the much-needed technical support complimenting the infrastructure and support provided by leading public cloud service providers.
• With cloudxchange.io Managed Services, you can rest assured knowing that your cloud infrastructure is fully managed and optimized for your business needs. cloudxchange.io provides expert technical support with pay-as-you go managed services and improved ROI on your cloud investments.

Leading retail ERP solution provider

About the company

• India’s leading retail ERP solution provider.
• They are providing retail ERP to leading retailer like Adidas, Mahindra, Samsung, Samsonite etc.
• Earlier they use to provider dedicated infrastructure for each customer and use to host at any of the traditional DC.
• This was incurring huge operations cost as they had to manage multiple setups & application binaries.
• Due to multiple setups their end customer pricing was also high due to high input cost.

It is a market leader providing business management for the retail and distribution sectors. With over 10000+ customers over the past 20 years, the company has provided comprehensive solutions to organizations of all sizes from an independent outlet to a large chain of outlets. We are present in India.

• Cost effective Virtual machine to run production for limited time of business hours.
• Should be very secure access to environment.
• Backup solution.
• ITIL based complete life cycle of technology based tool to maintain all events for Audit.

Proposed Solution

• Azure cloud services.
• Azure automation.
• Azure IPSec VPN.
• Cloud protect as backup solution.
• Service desk tool for ticketing.
• Cloud support for monitoring system

Process

SaaS based ERP with single ERP software for multiple customers. Helped wondersoft to transform application with SaaS based platform with following:

• Application load balancing with auto scaling.
• Dynamic content moved from application servers to Azure blob storage.
• Always on SQL active configuration for highest availability.
• DR setup on other Azure region with Azure site recovery.

Customer Benefits

• Production environment migrated to Azure platform as legacy content.
• Cost optimization achieved by automation to run the resources.
• Installed and configured the cloud protect as a backup solution.
• Ability to restore data as and when required.
• Even a restoration can be done as a complete Virtual Machine. With this option we achieve Minimum RPO & RTO.

Growth Source financial technologies chooses Amazon Web Services for hosting their Credit Bureau and business information Applications on cloud

By : cloudxchange.io

Use Case : AWS Cloud Infrastructure IAAS -Large Scale Windows greenfield deployment.

About the Customer :

Growth Source Financial technologies is a well-funded new-age digital Non-Banking Financial Corporation, founded by Peeyush Misra and Yashraj Erande in March 2019. It is led by seven professionals well respected in their fields and funded by Global and Indian institutions.

Product Landscape Includes:

• Loan Against Property
• Business Loans
• Consumer Loans

About Growth Source :

Growth Source Financial Technologies Private Limited is a fintech startup focused towards consumer funding business. They were looking to launch their business applications with shortest period possible to shorten their go to market time.

The Challenge :

• Since growth source is a fintech startup in consumer finance segment, they have unpredictable workload and scalability requirement.
• Growth Source need their entire Infrastructure on Cloud with High Availability with no single point of failure.
• Multiple applications testing to be done before finalizing application stack for their various business units.
• Long term vision of growth source management requires next generation PAAS and AI services best suited on public cloud.
• Hardware lifecycle management.
• Working on upcoming technologies.

Proposed Solution :

Considering growth source’s requirements, we proposed AWS based solution considering following requirements.

• High availability
• Scalability
• Cost Optimization
• Performance
• Security

Why Amazon Web Service :

Growth Source adopt backup solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. They were interested in determining a better solution for data backup on cloud. Growth Source is engaged with cloudxchange.io, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner to evaluate backup solution to manage huge set of on-premises backup to AWS Cloud and leverage cloud benefits.

AWS Services Used :

Following services have been used in AWS cloud,

• Amazon Code Commit
• Amazon API Gateway
• Amazon Pinpoint Service
• Amazon EC2 & Amazon Elastic block storage
• Amazon Lambda
• Amazon CloudWatch
• AWS CloudTrail
• Amazon Simple notification service
• AWS Simple storage service
• AWS Config (Configuration management)
• AWS Guard Duty
• AWS Web Application Firewall
• Aws Inspector
• Aws Key management service

Operational Excellence :

cloudxchange.io has own service desk web portal for managing the incidents, alerts, sending alerts to user. cloudxchange.io will provide 24 X 7 help desk support (Phone, Email & web based) to customers. cloudxchange.io’s help desk will support customers to address problems related to solution. The Service Desk application includes all direct interaction between a user and the service desk by phone or by Email-ID. It also includes all user activities that occur by use of the self-service Web portal.

Functionality includes :

• Incident management, users can raise tickets via email, self-service portal, phone, or in person as per ITIL standards.
• SLA Management & Self-Service Portal.
• Automation & Service Catalog.
• 24*7 Customer Hotline support through chat, Mobile hotline and email.

Security :

• Enabled Multi-level security – KMS encryption, password protection and SSL while transferring the data on AWS Cloud.
• Enabled Amazon S3 server-side encryption (AES-256) to encrypt the data.
• AWS Web Application firewall.
• Antivirus protection using Trend Micro endpoint protection.
• AWS Guard Duty.
• AWS Inspector.
• AWS Config.
• Disk Encryption.
• Basic DDOS protection.

Cost Optimization :

• Growth Source will access some servers infrequently, so proposed solution is designed in a way to optimize the cost.
• Script is configured on the server in such a way that the servers will run in only particular time as per their requirement. So, it is a better choice with respect to cost saving.

The Benefits :

• Free-up IT resources. Improve efficiency by freeing up valuable financial and staff resources.
• Reduced Capital Expenditures. no longer needs to acquire, enterprise backup software, or hardware system. This eliminates the burden of budgeting for capital equipment well in advance as well as the capital expense.
• During critical events such as on-premises data center outage, when many applications must be restored simultaneously and as soon as possible.
• Implemented AWS KMS Encryption on Instance volumes to secure the data of the server.

Monitoring Services Features :

Server Monitoring –

• A quick summary on the status and performance of your server over the last seven days through our heat map analysis.
• CPU/memory/disk utilization.
• Services and processes.
• Network statistics including bandwidth utilized by the server.
• Processor queue length and uptime.

Reports –

• Availability Summary Report.
• Busy Hours Report.
• Health Trend Report.
• Performance Report.

About the Partner :

• cloudxchange.io is an Advanced consulting partner in Amazon web service (AWS) Partner network (APN).
• Our wide range of Cloud based offerings with comprehensive services and cost-effective approach will help you meet your technology and business objectives.
• cloudxchange.io’s Managed Services for public clouds delivers 24 x 7 monitoring and management services by experienced administrators who are experts in supporting public cloud environments. As an official technology partners with leading public cloud service providers, we provide the much-needed technical support complimenting the infrastructure and support provided by leading public cloud service providers.
• With cloudxchange.io’s Managed Services, you can rest assured knowing that your cloud infrastructure is fully managed and optimized for your business needs. cloudxchange.io provides expert technical support with pay-as-you go managed services and improved ROI on your cloud investments.

About the company Leading NBFC in business of giving credits to

About the company

• Leading NBFC in business of giving credits to merchants.
• They offer the best products and services in the market. Their in-house technology platform is tailored to meet the unique requirements of their innovative loan products.
• They wanted to run entire IT setup on cloud including DR as customer didn’t wanted to create their own DC and manage the same.

Customer’s business requirements

• Across service provider DR with zero RPO.
• 15 minutes RPO backup for critical servers.
• Secure access from HO, Branches & remote users.
• Production systems wanted to run on stable, robust, user-friendly platform.
• Environment must be secured for operations financial institutions.
• Secure connection between on premise and the production environment.
• Disaster recovery on stable and secure platform geographically different locations.
• Backup solution
• ITIL based complete life cycle of technology

Proposed Solution

• Primary site hosted on Azure Chennai & DR on AWS Mumbai.
• DR configuration with near zero RPO & 30 Minutes RTO.
• Unified IP SEC VPN connectivity from offices & unified VPN access across Cloud service providers for roaming users.
• Dynamic scaling for application servers based on workload.
• Unified AD authentication for server infrastructure & users.
• Azure data center for running production environment.
• AWS data center for running Disaster recovery.
• Service desk as an ITIL based complete life cycle of technology for ticketing and alerting.
• Cloudxsupport as Cloud monitoring tool.

Following applications hosted on cloud

• Core lending ERP
• Online credit authorization system with integration with CIBIL.
• Online payment gateway with Yes bank integration.
• Active Directory
• Service desk tool
• Complete Development

Benefits

• Azure is user-friendly cloud platform.
• Old production was running on Microsoft Windows platforms so moving to Azure was a smooth process been a same technology family.
• Enough secure to run financial institutions business process like multifactor authentication for accessing Prod and UAT environment, limited access to environment by allowing authorized IPs.
• Able to achieve secured connection between on premise and cloud platform with VPN. Very cost effective solution to run 24 x7 production system.
• Disaster recovery deployed on AWS. Successful connection between both cloud platforms for transfer of data to DR site without VPN.
• Deployed low cost and low resources on DR site to utilize DR very efficiently. Installed and configured the snapshot based backup solution.
• Ability to take snapshot with 15 min time interval to achieve business requirement of minimum RPO & RTO.
• Environment is made secure to face Ransomware attack.
• Maintain all records to achieve compliance.
• Service desk to log all the events and Cloudxsupport as a monitoring tool to get alerted by all events and to Act as and when required to address the incidents to resolutions.

Customer Name: Magic Bus India Foundation

Use Case: Microsoft Dynamics Navision Migration from On-Premises Migration to AWS.

Technology Solutions involved: Windows, Amazon Web Service(AWS), MS SQL Server

Tool Used: AWS cloud Services ( EC2, EBS, S3 ), MS SQL DB, Double take for migration

Platform: Window servers, MS SQL Std

About Magic Bus :

Magic Bus India Foundation is an NGO non profit organization by enabling children to complete secondary education, and skilling young people to be in jobs, we are helping move a generation out of the vicious cycle of poverty. Founded by Matthew Spacie in 1999, Magic Bus equips children and young people in the age group of 12 to 18, with the skills and knowledge they need, to grow up and move out of poverty. This takes them from a childhood full of challenges to a life with meaningful livelihood. set up by a team of professionals with competencies in Financial content, software development and database design using a variety of platforms, technologies and financial domain knowledge.

Customer Challenges :

• Magic Bus had hosted their Microsoft Dynamics Navision at the traditional data center. They were facing availability issue with their application hosting.
• The scalability of their application was one of their biggerst concern with traditional setup.
• Traditional backup architecture was not meeting their application availability expectations.

Cloud Protect Backup :

CloudProtect is a backup solution that transfers data to the public cloud storage and restores it in minutes. The program connects to a specified storage account and securely transfers backup files and folders to the cloud, serving as a transport between the end user’s and a remote storage facility.

Our approach to Magic Bus for enabling data backup on cloud includes the following activities:

1. AWS S3 is used for data backup using online data transfer to cloud. Data is encrypted and compressed during transition.
2. Standard Data retrieval plan allow to access any of archives within several hours. Standard retrievals typically complete within 3-5 hours.
3. Configure cloud protect backup agent on customer system
   • Create a File-Level Backup Plan
   • Create a backup plan of drive level backup of files and folders
   • Create a schedule for backups
   • Encrypt the data both at rest and in transmit
   • Configure retention policies
4. Providing End to End 24 *7 backup support

Backup network level architecture :

Server details: power BI Server, MBIF-VM3,CRMPROD,database_ax

Operational Excellence :

cloudxchange.io’s has own service desk web portal for managing the incidents, alerts, sending alerts to user. cloudxchange.io’s will provide 24 X 7 help desk support (Phone, Email & web based) to customers. cloudxchange.io’s help desk will support customers to address problems related to solution. The Service Desk application includes all direct interaction between a user and the service desk by phone or by Email-ID. It also includes all user activities that occur by use of the self-service Web portal.

Functionality includes:

Following services have been used in AWS cloud,

• Incident management, users can raise tickets via email, self-service portal, phone, or in person as per ITIL standards
• SLA Management & Self-Service Portal
• Automation & Service Catalog
• 24*7 Customer Hotline support through chat, Mobile hotline and email

Security :

Functionality includes :

• Enabled Multi-level security – AES-256 encryption, password protection and SSL while transferring the data on AWS Cloud
• Enabled Amazon S3 server-side encryption to encrypt the data.
• To use keys that are managed by Amazon S3 for default encryption, choose AES-256. For more information about using Amazon S3 server-side encryption to encrypt your data, see Protecting Data with Amazon S3-Managed Encryption Keys in the Amazon Simple Storage Service Developer Guide.

Reliability :

• Durable data storage provided by Amazon S3, which is designed for 11 nines durability.
• Amazon S3 is created and stored across at least three devices in a single AWS region. Even when the following best practices, on-premises capabilities cannot match AWS durability due to our global scale and security.

Cost Optimization :

• Magic Bus will access the data infrequently, so proposed solution is designed in a way to optimize the cost. Data will move into glacier if customer required, since customer is fine with the retrievals process of 5 hours. So, it is a better choice with respect to cost saving
• Since migration of on-prem windows servers has been completed and migrated to AWS cloud, Elasticity play an important role in cost optimization.
• Based on customer requirement, we can easily scale up and down the servers with minimal downtime.

The Benefits :

Free-up IT resources. Improve efficiency by freeing up valuable financial and staff resources.

Reduced Capital Expenditures. no longer needs to acquire, enterprise backup software, or hardware system. This eliminates the burden of budgeting for capital equipment well in advance as well as the capital expense.

Availability of data for restoring on cloud– no need to locate or retrieve on physical server. During critical events such as on-premises data center outage, when many applications must be restored simultaneously and as soon as possible. None of these problems occur with Amazon S3. Data restores can begin immediately, within 5 hours.

Monitoring Services Features :

Server Monitoring –

• A quick summary on the status and performance of your server over the last seven days through our heat map analysis
• CPU/memory/disk utilization.
• Services and processes.
• Network statistics including bandwidth utilized by the server.
• Processor queue length and uptime.

Reports –

• Availability Summary Report.
• Busy Hours Report.
• Health Trend Report.
• Performance Report.

Why Amazon Web Service :

Magic Bus were interested in determining a better solution for migrating application and database models that can increase its accuracy and efficiency of their business over cloud and wants to adopt backup solution over cloud. Magic Bus engaged with cloudxchange.io, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner to evaluate the capabilities of application and database migration, and backup solution on AWS Cloud and leverage cloud benefits

Following services have been used in AWS cloud,

• Amazon S3
• Amazon IAM
• Amazon EC2
• Amazon EBS
• Amazon Lambda
• Amazon CloudWatch

About the Partner cloudxchange.io :

Partner: cloudxchange.io is an advance consulting partner in Amazon web service (AWS) Partner network (APN), focusing exclusively on AWS.

cloudxchange.io would like to thank Magic Bus for providing an opportunity to submit Cloud Services backup proposal.

Our wide range of Cloud based offerings with comprehensive services and cost-effective approach will help you meet your technology and business objectives.

cloudxchange.io’s Managed Services for public clouds delivers 24 x 7 monitoring and management services by experienced administrators who are experts in supporting public cloud environments. As an official technology partners with leading public cloud service providers, we provide the much-needed technical support complimenting the infrastructure and support provided by leading public cloud service providers.

With cloudxchange.io’s Managed Services, you can rest assured knowing that your cloud infrastructure is fully managed and optimized for your business needs. cloudxchange.io provides expert technical support with pay-as-you go managed services and improved ROI on your cloud investments

A leading petrochemical company

About the company

It is an international oil and gas engineering group operating within two market segments:

• Process furnaces for refining, petrochemicals and hydrogen production, an area in which this is a world leader,
• Natural-gas treatment, through its subsidiary Prosernat. In this field, the Group is active as a technology provider and EPC (Engineering, Procurement & Construction) player…

Its teams have expertise in thermal and mechanical furnace design, natural-gas treatment units,the fabrication and modularization of equipment and project management.The Group offers awide range of furnaces for ethylene and aromatics production units.

Customer’s business requirements

They were looking for cloud based DR with zero RPO & 2 hours RTO. They wanted to archive 25 TB data on cloud & DR for 9 servers. All their engineering workstations with more than 200 GB data, needed to be backed up on cloud and all their user PST as backup.

Proposed Solution

• Cloud based DR with many to one server replication using Double Take DR.
• Real time replication of data to cloud.
• 1 Gbps direct connect to AWS for faster replication and quick restoration of data.
• Cloud based backup to AWS S3 for workstations.
• 25 TB data archived to AWS Glacier

Process

Direct connect to VPN with throughput of 1gbps. Arranged 3rd party replication tool doubletake on AWS server.9 server replication on single server. Via direct connect, tape library data uploaded on AWS server. Cloudberry backup installation, Backup uploaded on S3.

Customer Benefits

• Lower TCO for cloud with many to 1 server DR.
• Zero data loss due to real time replication
• Secure connectivity to cloud with Direct connect & VPN.
• Low cost and reliable data storage of compliance data on AWS glacier, customer removed traditional tape based archival to cloud archival.