“Data is critical to our business and Veeam is critical to our data. By enabling more frequent backups and making the recovery process reliable, Veeam has eliminated the risk of data loss. We are now confident of protecting our data against unplanned challenges, such as ransomware.”

Business Challenge

Kunal Structure works on large-scale infrastructure projects across the country. To keep its construction sites running, the company is 100% dependent on the availability of ERP data that feeds into key business functions like human resources, tendering, supply chain management, finance and accounting.

To understand the criticality of data to the company, consider this – if the ERP system experiences any downtime, construction at project sites will come to a halt as raw material will not get issued. Any delay due to downtime directly affects the company’s revenue.

“A project’s profitability depends on meeting delivery timelines as we incur the daily fixed costs of labor, machinery, etc. regardless of whether the work is happening or not. Delay in execution increases our costs, diminishing the profit margins,” explained Kamal Mehta, Deputy General Manager – IT, Kunal Structure.

For a project size of INR 200 crores or two billion rupees, the company will incur approximately INR 10 lakhs (one million rupees) of loss for each day of delay due to downtime. Under contract terms, clients also charge penalties for delay in delivery, compounding the losses further.

Besides the company’s revenue, there is a lot more riding on these projects. “Our projects like roads, hospitals, airports and railways have a direct bearing on the daily lives of our country’s citizens. For instance, if road or hospital construction gets delayed, it inconveniences millions of people. As such, 24/7 availability of data is non-negotiable,” said Mehta.

However, Kunal Structure was far from achieving 24/7 data availability. Their manual backup and recovery systems were taking three times longer than the required time frame, and it would take them at least 24 hours to restore data if downtime occurred.

“Due to long backup and recovery timelines we did not have 100% confidence in meeting the business requirement of 24/7 data availability. It also put additional strain on our already limited IT resources that could have been utilized in productive tasks like improving IT service efficiencies,” explained Mehta.

Moreover, the manually operated backup and recovery processes were highly prone to errors, heightening the risk of data loss. Without a reliable backup and recovery system, Kunal Structure was essentially sitting on a ticking time bomb that could bring its operations to a sudden halt with substantial revenue losses.

The Veeam Solution

After evaluating various solutions, Kunal Structure chose Veeam® Backup & Replication™ for backup and recovery of its IT systems running on a VMware virtualized environment and Linux workloads. Mehta and his team were particularly impressed with the faster backup and recovery timelines of Veeam solution compared to other solutions. Veeam lived up to its promise of speed, bringing down the backup and recovery time to one-third of what it was before.

With faster backups, Kunal Structure can now back up all their data daily. Previously, only critical backups were done daily, while non-critical data was backed up weekly. The business is now confident that 100% of its data is available.

Veeam has also reduced data recovery time from one day to 30 minutes, ensuring much better business continuity in the face of downtime and preventing potential losses of up to INR 10 lakhs per day due to daily fixed costs, delay penalties and lost revenues. The recovery process has also become more reliable with multiple restore points which guarantees recoverability. With Instant VM Recovery® feature, it can achieve RTOs of less than five minutes.

Since its implementation of Veeam® Backup & Replication™, Kunal Structure has been able to maintain an uptime of 99.99%. Eliminating any downtime-related delays has helped the company improve profitability and avoid potential losses, as well as higher retention of satisfied clients. Internally, this has also helped build greater credibility for IT with the business.

“The business is not concerned with how long it takes to backup and recover data. What matters to them is consistently delivering to the clients. They know they can now rely on IT to deliver that, thanks to Veeam,” said Mehta.

He added, “Data is critical to our business and Veeam is critical to our data. By enabling more frequent backups and making the recovery process reliable, Veeam has eliminated the risk of data loss. We are now confident of protecting our data against unplanned challenges, such as ransomware.”

The Results

• De-risked business with 99.99% uptime
  “Veeam has helped us achieve 99.99% uptime, ensuring that we meet project delivery SLAs. In turn, our clients are happy as they are able to fulfill their commitment to the millions of people who will be using their infrastructure that we build,” explained Mehta.
• Reduced RTO from 1 day to 30 minutes
  Veeam has reduced data recovery time from one day to 30 minutes, ensuring much better business continuity in the face of downtime and preventing potential losses of up to INR 10 lakhs per day due to fixed costs, delay penalties and lost revenues.
• Protect data against unplanned challenges such as ransomware
  “Data is critical to our business and Veeam is critical to our data. By enabling more frequent backups and making the recovery process reliable, it has eliminated the risk of data loss. We are now confident of protecting our data against unplanned challenges, such as ransomware,” said Mehta.

Authored By
Kamal Mehta, Deputy General Manager – IT, Kunal Structure India Pvt. Ltd.