Veeam Powers Birlasoft’s Digital Transformation Expertise With Availability And Data Replication

The Business Challenge

Birlasoft is a well-known leader in the IT and ITES sector and works with customers across the world. The global nature of both Birlasoft’s operations and their customers’ businesses contributes to the challenge for the IT environment. Birlasoft has been a partner for IT transformation for the past two decades and is part of the prestigious CK Birla Group.

As Birlasoft leads its clients through digital transformation, the business’ IT environment has to be at the forefront of the industry. In providing solutions to their customers, the IT infrastructure needs to deliver 24/7 availability. Any tiny amount of downtime would badly impact customers, which in turn would harm Birlasoft’s own business.

Birlasoft’s legacy solution was causing significant problems across the IT ecosystem, as any outage was resulting in a high recovery time, disrupting both client businesses and internal operations.

Kishore Kumar Ranjan, Head of Technology and Operations for Birlasoft India Ltd, is responsible for the overall IT environment and needed a solution that would restore the confidence of his associated internal stakeholders in the availability of businesscritical data.

“Any time part of our environment went down it was taking a long time for us to recover it. So, data availability was a challenge our internal teams, and the third party’s recovery was not predictive,” said Kishore Ranjan.

“Suppose our delivery teams have to pull out data that is directly impacting on our delivery function and the systems are down – if they are not able to access that data and pull it out, how will they be able to deliver it for customers? My internal customer confidence was very low in that high data availability.”

The Veeam Solution

Kishore Ranjan worked with Evantage IT, an IT services provider that specialises in Data Management services, to find the perfect-fit solution of Veeam Backup & Replication Enterprise Edition. The solution allows Birlasoft to maintain uptime with the confidence that any unavoidable outage would be highly recoverable with minimal to no disruption for the business and its customers.

“With our legacy software, the backup windows were going beyond seven expected hours and that was having a huge effect on the internal confidence in our data availability. As well as the RTO challenges, our legacy solution had become unsustainable cost wise and was no longer delivering good value”, said Ranjan.

“So now that we have implemented Veeam, we are able to save a lot of costs. And from a backup window perspective, efforts have gone down drastically for our internal team in managing and maintaining the easy-to-use Veeam solution,” Ranjan continued.

As Birlasoft is still in the early stages of working with its Veeam solution, the business has been fortunate enough to not have to deal with any outages or implement its disaster recovery protocol. However, the efficiency and effectiveness of the solution is nonetheless making a huge difference to Kishore Ranjan and his team of internal stakeholders.

“We have seen, during our POC, that the Veeam solution will have minimal intervention. During the BCDR demonstration we saw that it will automatically replicate what we back up to our environment, so from an RTO perspective, we know that the recovery time will be minimised,” Kishore Ranjan explained.

“On the day-to-day level, we’re already reaping the benefits of the Veeam Backup & Replication solution, from a cost-saving and storage space perspective, but also in terms of man-hours. So, whereas one of my team members would have spent eight hours managing our legacy solution, they are now putting in one hour. So that directly impacts the number of hours I can utilise this person for other tasks.”

Kishore Ranjan is seeing the benefits of implementing a Veeam solution both in his present workflow, and also in his future IT roadmap.

Ranjan explained: “With the savings in manpower and costs that we’re seeing already, the internal confidence in the recovery capabilities of our environment and the confidence in our data availability is very high. We’re currently in a stage of growth as a company, and while we’re not using Veeam’s cloud capabilities at the moment, the scalability of this solution to the cloud, ensuring that all our data is secure and highly available across environments, is going to help me in a big way.”

The Results

• Easy-to-manage backup and availability solution that reduces the manpower required for backup maintenance by 80%
  “Being able to reduce our efforts from a manpower perspective is having an affect across the IT operations at Birlasoft. Our backup window can now be managed efficiently and with minimal team input, delivering an 80% time saving on our previous solution.”
• Cost-savings for the Birlasoft business, and scalability to the cloud that can be rolled out across other teams and other localities throughout the CK Birla Group
  “Veeam’s cloud presence is a big factor. I think in a month’s time, we’ll be a bigger organisation than we are right now, and in this phase of growth, that scalability is a massive help for us,” Kishore Ranjan said.
• Internal and client confidence in data security and 24/7 availability
  “During our POCs, our recovery was very fast. Now, in any disaster-like situations, our team has confidence that we will be able to recover anything extremely quickly and continue to deliver excellent solutions to our clients,” Ranjan concluded.