TSDPL to Modernize its Backup Infrastructure with Acronis Cyber

Tata Steel Downstream Products Limited (TSDPL) is a fully owned subsidiary of Tata Steel, a part of the Tata Group. TSDPL was founded to provide Steel Service Centre solutions to industrial customers for the first time, and it is India’s first organized Steel Service Centre capable of high tensile steel processing.

The company has ten large processing units and fourteen sales and distribution locations across India, as well as a large partner ecosystem of external processing agencies and suppliers. TSDPL was using an antiquated backup strategy despite having a sophisticated IT infrastructure designed to support its nationwide supply chain. Users were manually backing up files and saving them to shared folders or external hard drives. Because users did not perform regularly scheduled backups, RPO averaged 7 days in the event of a workstation failure or data loss incident.

THE CHALLENGES

TSDPL’s previous, manual backup approach resulted in a very large RPO and potential data loss, which was exacerbated by the pandemic-induced shift to work-from-home.

The company used a variety of approaches and tools to protect various workloads, none of which were in the cloud. This meant that restorations necessitated support engineers resolving issues on-site, which was severely hampered by work-from-home requirements, threatening overall performance and productivity if employees were unable to work for days or weeks at a time.

KEY CHALLENGES

• Manual processes
• Very long RTO and RPO
• Dependency on employee compliance
KEY REQUIREMENTS
• Cloud-based
• Automation and control
• Secure datacentre
PROTECTED RESOURCES
• 500+ workloads protected every day KEY BENEFITS
• 50x improvement in protected workloads
• Significant improvement in RTO and RPO
• Removed employee dependencies

THE SOLUTION — ACRONIS CYBER PROTECT CLOUD

TSDPL determined that Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, which integrates data protection and cybersecurity in one solution, was their ideal solution because it supported more than 20 virtual, physical, and cloud platforms and provided a hybrid of on-premises and cloud backup and recovery capabilities. A single portal provided by a local MSP partner, HRM Technologies, enabled TSDPL to protect, patch, and recover individual files, application data, Microsoft 365 mailboxes, or entire virtual platforms. Furthermore, Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud allows TSDPL to restore workstations to similar or dissimilar hardware while managing data from a centralized location.

TSDPL considered Commvault and Veeam, but chose Acronis for its fully integrated cloud backup and extensible platform for other solutions such as disaster recovery and cybersecurity. Time to market was also an important consideration, as the company needed to roll out a solution quickly. Acronis also had a datacenter in India that met all local data residency regulations and had all necessary cybersecurity certifications.

TECHNICAL AND BUSINESS BENEFITS

TSDPL’s requirements were met by Acronis, and the operational gains have been significant.

Prior to Acronis, about 10 backups were performed per day, consisting of 10-20 workloads. With Acronis, this number increased 50 times to 500 backups per day with easily as many workloads. Furthermore, RTO and RPO metrics were significantly improved. Prior to Acronis, RTO could reach 5 days and RPO could take weeks. RTO was 4-6 hours after Acronis, and RPO was 1 day or less.

Rajesh Kumar, Chief Information Officer, said, “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 that have left the company. We were very excited that this was cloud-to-cloud and didn’t require any other operational infrastructure. With Acronis, we are controlling important data and are no longer dependent on our users. By storing it in a certified and secure data centre 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 further stated, “With the Acronis platform in place and the success we have already seen, we are now looking at rolling out the Advanced Security and Advanced Disaster Recovery solutions.”