In this case study, learn how Tata Steel Downstream Products Limited, the Indian-based subsidiary of Tata Group, modernizes its backup infrastructure with Acronis Cyber Protect. Doing so increased protected workloads by 50x and improved RTO and RPO from 5 and 7 days, respectively, to 4-6 hours and 1 day or less.
BACKGROUND
Tata Steel was created to bring Steel Service Centre solutions for the first time to industrial customers and is the first organized Steel Service Centre capable of high tensile steel processing in India. The company has 10 large processing units and 14 sales and distribution locations throughout India, along with a very large partner ecosystem of external processing agencies and suppliers.
Despite a sophisticated IT infrastructure designed to support its nationwide supply chain, Tata Steel was operating with an antiquated approach to backup. Users performed manual backups by saving files in shared folders or external hard drives. In the event of a workstation failure or data loss incident, because users did not do regularly scheduled backups, RPO averaged seven days.
THE CHALLENGES
Tata Steel’s existing manual approach to backup resulted in a very large RPO and potential data loss, and this problem was exacerbated with the shift to working from home due to the pandemic. The company had multiple approaches and tools for protecting different workloads. This meant that restorations required support engineers to resolve issues on-site, and this was significantly compromised with work-from-home requirements, threatening overall performance and productivity if employees were unable to work for days or weeks at a time.
THE SOLUTION — ACRONIS CYBER PROTECT
With support for on-premises and cloud backup, as well as granular recovery capabilities, Tata Steel determined that Acronis Cyber Protect — which integrates data protection and cybersecurity in one solution — was their ideal solution. A single portal allowed Tata Steel to back up individual files or safeguard their entire workload by backing up the whole system as a single image, ensuring flexible restore capabilities. Moreover, Acronis Cyber Protect provides the flexibility that lets Tata Steel restore and manage workstation data from a centralized management console.
Tata Steel evaluated Commvault and Veeam but decided to go with Acronis because of its fully integrated backup solution and extensible platform for other solutions like disaster recovery and cybersecurity. Time to market also played a major factor, as the company needed to roll out a solution rapidly. Additionally, Acronis had a data center in India which complied with all local regulations on data residency and had all the necessary cybersecurity certifications.
TECHNICAL AND BUSINESS BENEFITS
Acronis met all of Tata Steel’s requirements, and the operational gains have been quite significant. Prior to Acronis, approximately 10 backups were done per day, covering about 10 to 20 workloads. With Acronis, this number jumped 50 times to 500 backups daily.
Moreover, RTO and RPO metrics were dramatically improved. Before Acronis, RTO was up to five days, and RPO was seven days, sometimes weeks. After Acronis, RTO was four to six hours, and RPO was one day or less.
According to Rajesh Kumar, Chief Information Officer, “Acronis squarely addressed our most popular use case — when a user accidentally deleted some data. They also help us administrate Microsoft 365 by archiving data from employees who have left the company.” Rajesh continued, “With Acronis, we are controlling important data and are no longer dependent on our users. By storing it in a certified and secure data center in India, we are confident that the data will not be lost in any case.
Additionally, the compression is really good, and we save time and money on downloading and uploading data.” He concluded, “With the Acronis platform in place and the success we have already seen, we are now looking at rolling out other Acronis solutions.”