Tata Steel Downstream Products partners with Acronis Cyber to modernize its backup infrastructure

BACKGROUND
Tata Steel Downstream Products Limited (TSDPL) is a 100% subsidiary of Tata Steel which is part of the Tata Group. TSDPL 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, TSDPL was operating with an antiquated approach to backup. Users were performing manual backups and 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 7 days.

THE CHALLENGES
TSDPL’s existing, manual approach to backup was resulting in a very large RPO and potential data loss, and this problem was exacerbated with the shift to work-from-home due to the pandemic.

The company had multiple approaches and tools to protecting different workloads, and none of it was in the cloud. This meant that restorations required support engineers to resolve issues onsite, and this was significantly compromised 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
With support for more than 20 virtual, physical, and cloud platforms, and a hybrid of on-premises and cloud backup and recovery capabilities, TSDPL determined that Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud – which integrates data protection and cybersecurity in one solution – was their ideal solution. Delivered by a local MSP partner, HRM Technologies, a single portal gave TSDPL the ability to protect, patch, and recover individual files, application data, Microsoft 365 mailboxes, or entire virtual platforms. Moreover, Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud provides the flexibility that lets TSDPL restore workstations to similar or dissimilar hardware while managing data from a centralized location.

TSDPL evaluated Commvault and Veeam but decided to go with Acronis because of its fully integrated cloud backup and extensible platform for other solutions like disaster recovery and cybersecurity. Time to market also played a major factor, as the company needed to rapidly roll out a solution. Additionally, Acronis had a datacentre 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 TSDPL’s requirements and the operational gains have been quite significant.

Prior to Acronis, approximately 10 backups were being done per day consisting of about 10-20 workloads. With Acronis, this number jumped 50x to 500 backups being done daily with easily as many workloads. Moreover, RTO and RPO metrics were dramatically improved. Before Acronis, RTO was up to 5 days and RPO was 7 days, sometimes weeks. After Acronis, RTO was 4-6 hours and RPO was 1 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 that have left the company. We were very excited that this was cloud-to-cloud and didn’t require any other operational infrastructure.” 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 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 concludes, “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.”