BVG India Limited, founded in 1997 by Mr. Hanmantrao Gaikwad, is a responsible and forward-thinking company that seeks to support India’s entire development. By 2030, the BVG group hopes to make a positive difference in the lives of ten million people through empowerment, employment, and education.

Trying to Meet Recovery Goals

BVG’s Disaster Recovery(DR) system was on the verge of failure. For disaster recovery, they used on-site infrastructure servers, which lacked the flexibility they would have needed. As a result, they lost all of their data. To overhaul its DR solution and fulfil the company’s larger goal of migration to the cloud, BVG turned to AeonX. 

BVG’s focus on customer service has fuelled a rapid level of growth since its launch around three decades ago. BVG’s DR testing and drills revealed the following issues with its existing infrastructure:

• The solution, which was hosted on a physical server on-site, was unable to keep up with the expansion of the business. 

• Backup was performed in the on-premise data centre, which was expensive and hard to scale as requirements increased.

• Hardware was starting to deteriorate and would last for 2 to 3 years at most.

• Having no disaster recovery system enabled a heavy reliance on local backups that are unreliable, which led to the loss of data.

Furthermore, it had limited assistance for technology testing and development and its systems were not as adaptable as they would have desired. Additionally, the company lacked a comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery(DR) plan and required a technology infrastructure that could meet demand while also fostering additional expansion.

In search of reliability and automation

BVG India Limited began working with AeonX, an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner, in the summer of 2022 to deploy AWS On-Cloud Disaster Recovery, which minimizes downtime and data loss with the quick, dependable recovery of cloud-based applications using economical storage, minimum computing, and point-in-time recovery. 

By working through the night through its 24/7 delivery centre, AeonX came up with a solution to fix the production server. It was accomplished by proposing the following structural changes:

• By hosting Disaster Recovery on the cloud, we minimize downtime and data loss, utilizing affordable storage, minimal computing, and point-in-time recovery methods of cloud-based applications.

• Review of monthly costs using AWS Trusted Advisor and, if necessary, recommendations to reduce the number of instances.

• Recommended to turn off the preload option when setting up replication between primary and secondary instances. By deactivating this option, duplicated data is not loaded into the memory of the secondary HANA instance, so the second instance does not require the same amount of memory. Lowering costs while ensuring fail-safe protection.

• By using scripting, we were able to automate the DR monitoring and DR health status.

• With the scripting automation technique, BVG is given real-time notifications; this allows them to be informed of any problems immediately and take swift action.

With a more efficient DR solution in place, BVG India Limited has been working alongside AeonX to accelerate the migration from its on-premises data centre to the cloud on AWS. Using AWS disaster recovery hosting in the cloud, BVG has saved at least 20x on upfront costs. It improved its recovery goals, achieving an RTO of 4 hours as opposed to 12 hours (a 67 per cent jump) and an RPO of 2 hours as opposed to 4 hours (a 50 per cent boost).

Additionally, it postponed a sizable planned capital expenditure to upgrade the hardware in its DR data centre and instead redirected that money to cover the operational costs of maintaining DR in the cloud.