Granules India Limited uses Veeam solutions to accelerate mission-critical backups by 95%, protecting digital business processes from cyber-attackers

The business challenge

Since 1984, Granules India has been producing high-volume, high-quality medications for global healthcare enterprises. To help control costs while maintaining exceptional production quality, Granules India has recently embarked on a digital transformation initiative. By deploying industrial internet of things (IIoT) technologies across its business, the company aims to automate many processes: from packaging, shipping and warehouse management to manufacturing, research and development (R&D) and quality control.

As Granules India embeds digital workflows into its core business processes, data protection is becoming more important than ever. In the past, the company manually backed up its on-premises production systems to tape using a separate IBM Tivoli Storage Manager instance for each of its production environments. This approach required hours of manual work to backup and restore data — increasing the company’s exposure to reputational and revenue risks in the event of a recovery scenario.

“We stored backups in the same physical location as our production servers, which meant that both could be impacted if our data centers were inoperable or inaccessible,” said Reddy. “In addition, we only retained a single point-in-time copy of each system at any given time. If we were hit with a ransomware attack, there was a risk that our production systems and backups could both be encrypted or that we’d inadvertently backed up infected files — leaving us unable to restore our systems.”

The Veeam solution

To solve these challenges, Granules India looked for a new approach to data protection. The primary objectives were to store multiple versions of data in different locations, to enable write protection for backups and to reduce the time required to manage the end-to-end process.

“Veeam Backup & Replication stood out as the clear choice for Granules India,” said Reddy. “The Veeam solution offered all the capabilities we were looking for, including the option to backup data to multiple on-premises and cloud locations and create incremental backups to help identify and quarantine infected files.”

Following a successful proof of concept (POC), Granules India engaged its trusted technology partner Digital Track Solutions Private Limited to deploy and configure the Veeam solution.

“During the POC, we verified that all our key use cases worked perfectly,” said Reddy. “We were particularly impressed by how easy it is to back up our production data to AWS. We’ve since configured the Veeam solution based on the 3-2-1-1-0 rule: At least three copies of data, stored on two different media, with at least one copy offsite and offline and with verification to ensure zero backup errors. We now have backups in three different destinations: On-site tape, off-site tape and public cloud.”

Today, Granules India uses the Veeam solution to protect its mission-critical systems, including its laboratory information and quality control management systems, SAP S/4HANA applications and Microsoft Active Directory services.

“So far, we are protecting 40 virtual and physical servers with the Veeam solution, with a total data volume of 12TB — and those numbers will increase as we move into the second phase of the rollout,” said Reddy. “In the evening, we perform incremental backups of our laboratory systems, which we retain for seven days. As a result, we now have seven different versions of data at our disposal in a recovery scenario, which helps us to minimize the risk of ransomware attacks.”

While the Granules India IT team previously used multiple solutions for backing up its production environment, the company can now orchestrate the entire process in the Veeam solution — saving hours of manual work.

“In the past, it took our IT team four hours a day to back up all our clients and servers, and sometimes longer if a job failed,” said Reddy. “With Veeam, we can protect all our mission-critical data with just 10 minutes of work a day. The solution is extremely reliable, and we get immediate alerts if there’s an issue we need to investigate.”

Restoring data is now also significantly faster and easier.

Reddy said: “Data management used to be a marathon effort, but the Veeam solution has allowed us to compress three hours of painstaking restore work down to just 30 minutes. As our business continues its digital transformation, the ability to restore data quickly and reliably will be crucial to manage our risk. Thanks to Veeam, we can do exactly that.”

The results

• Accelerates daily backups by 95%, empowering IT team to focus on value-added work
  “We no longer create separate backup jobs for each of our production environments,” said Reddy. “With Veeam Backup & Replication, we manage all our backups from a central point, saving 20 person-hours of work each week.”
• Enables IT team to restore files 83% faster, reducing risk of business disruption
  “To restore files, we used to spend three hours tracking down which tape drives the data was stored on and manually extracting and loading it into production,” said Reddy. “Today, we’ve cut this process down to just 30 minutes — helping us to offer more responsive services to the business.”
• Backs up data to multiple on-premises and cloud destinations, mitigating the business impact of cyberattacks
  “In the event that one of our backups is compromised, we now have another two more to fall back on because we follow the 3-2-1-1-0 rule,” said Reddy. “With Veeam, we can also restore our data faster than ever, which shrinks the reputational and financial risks of cyberattacks.”