PT ALTO Network targets best-in-region service availability with 90% faster RTO from Veeam

The business challenge

If you use an ATM or POS in Indonesia, there’s a good chance that PT ALTO Network will process the transaction. For more than 25 years, the company has delivered ATM and POS switching services—and PT ALTO Network is now expanding its offering into digital/online payments processing.

“As one of four domestic switching institutions or payment infrastructure service providers, we play a big role in the sustainability of the payment system in Indonesia, thus any downtime in our systems has a big impact on the Indonesian economy,” said Hendri Desungku Wuntoro, IT Infrastructure Manager at PT ALTO Network. “For that reason, uptime is our top priority. Our long-term objective is to be the most reliable payment infrastructure company in Southeast Asia.”

PT ALTO Network relies on a hybrid cloud infrastructure consisting of virtual servers running on-premises and on Docker microservices running in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud to underpin its services. For high availability, the company operates separate primary and disaster recovery data centers, each configured with 15 bare-metal servers running 300 VMware virtual machines (VMs) for production services.

“Our company is regulated by the Indonesian central bank, which means we have stringent service-level agreements [SLAs] for availability and data protection,” said Wuntoro. “Depending on the specific SLA, we back up our data daily, weekly or monthly.”

PT ALTO Network targeted drastic improvements to its backup process. In the past, the company managed its backup processes manually, which was time-consuming and involved hours of hands-on work each day. PT ALTO Network aimed to use leading-edge technologies to improve effectiveness, speed and accuracy in its backup process.

“Manually backing up our data was inefficient, but the larger concern for the business was how long it took to restore our VMs,” said Wuntoro. “If one of our systems experienced an issue, this manual approach made it difficult and time-consuming, as it could take as long as five hours to rebuild it from scratch, which was a significant source of business risk. To solve that challenge, we looked for a fresh approach.”

The Veeam solution

After assessing the data protection market, PT ALTO Network selected Veeam Availability Suite, including Veeam Backup & Replication and monitoring and analytics from Veeam ONE.

“We felt that Veeam offered the best local support, which was extremely important to us,” said Wuntoro. “As well as scoring highly with trusted analysts like the technological research and consulting firm Gartner®, the solution is fully certified by VMware — a must-have for PT ALTO Network.”

Working with Veeam, the company ran a proof of concept (POC) to test how quickly it could back up and restore its systems. Based on the success of the POC exercise, PT ALTO Network engaged Veeam to deploy and configure the solution to protect all VMs across its business.

“Towards the end of our POC, one of our servers suffered a crash,” said Wuntoro. “Fortunately, we’d already backed up the VMs using Veeam. We restored the system into production with just a couple of clicks. That positive experience convinced us that Veeam Availability Suite was the right choice for our business.”

Today, PT ALTO Network uses the Veeam solution to back up 300 VMs in its on-premises environment. By deploying the solution on top of its VMs, the company avoids the need to procure additional hardware, helping to reduce operational costs.

“We can now orchestrate all our backups from a single point of control— cutting our management activities from three hours to just five minutes per day,” said Wuntoro. “Veeam saves us time and helps us ensure that we are meeting our availability and data protection SLAs. For example, we now trigger backups automatically and receive instant alerts if they don’t complete successfully. If we need to restore a VM, it’s faster and easier than ever: from five hours before to as little as 30 minutes today.”

PT ALTO Network has accelerated its growth for the past four years. Even as the company scales out its digital platforms, the Veeam solution helps it ensure that data protection processes continue to run smoothly and efficiently.

“Over the last four years, our IT team has grown from two to eight full-time equivalents [FTEs],” said Wuntoro. “If we still relied on data protection processes using old methods, we would need 20 to 30 FTEs to do the same task as we do now.”

Moreover, PT ALTO Network is already finding innovative ways to reuse its backup data to enhance availability.

“We were facing an intermittent stability issue with one of our VMs, which proved tough to pin down,” said Wuntoro. “Using the Veeam solution, we cloned the server and restored it to a range of different hosts, helping us diagnose and fix the problem. We are confident that Veeam Availability Suite will play an important role as PT ALTO Network strives to become Southeast Asia’s most reliable payment infrastructure provider.”

The results

• 90% faster VM restore times, minimizing disruption in a recovery scenario.
  The company can now restore its services without manually rebuilding VMs, reducing the business impact of unplanned downtime.
• 5x faster backups help the company meet data protection SLAs.
  “If we didn’t start nightly backups exactly on time, there was a risk we wouldn’t complete them within the available window,” said Wuntoro. “Faster backups give us plenty of headroom to re-run backups if needed.”
• 83% reduction in daily backup management work, helping to keep headcount lean.
  PT ALTO Network reduces the manual effort required to protect its IT environments, helping the company optimize its headcount even as its infrastructure grows.