Scotts Miracle-Gro, the world’s largest marketer of branded consumer lawn and garden products, needed to automate its disaster recovery (DR) processes to reduce the time and human effort involved. Arpio eliminated those headaches by dramatically reducing test cycle times and automating the processes such that anyone on the infrastructure team could perform the tests. Arpio helped the company modernize and expand its DR plan to include ransomware resilience, as well.
Key Business Impacts:
- Shortened DR test cycles from three long days to just a few hours
- Reduced the technical and emotional intensity of DR tests
- Delivered high testing reliability
- Reduced dependency on specific personnel
- Increased ransomware resilience
The Challenge: Handle Disaster Recovery With Any Available Resource at Any Given Time
Scotts Miracle-Gro is the world’s largest marketer of branded consumer lawn and garden products, with brands including Scotts, Miracle-Gro, Ortho, Roundup, and more. The company’s IT Infrastructure team had long struggled with manual, unreliable, and painful disaster recovery (DR) processes.
For years, their DR processes relied on outsourced support and heavily manual processes, which were impractical and time-intensive, and introduced some vulnerabilities. These failures frustrated the team and led to real organizational pain—and even team attrition. Things improved as they migrated to the cloud in 2015: “It wasn’t until we moved into AWS where we took over that process, and we managed to be able to get those timelines and actually have a successful test,” said Craig Dovyak, Senior Technical Manager, IT Architecture, Scotts Miracle-Gro.
But even then, their DR processes were too intense and took too long. Their DR remained highly error-prone due to human error around load-balancing issues. For example, someone would make a change to the production load balancer and forget to adjust the DR load balancer. Then, when they performed a DR test, they’d run into problems. While they were finally meeting their recovery time objective (RTO), they needed to reduce the effort required to do it.
“The goal was, we should be able to handle DR with any resource that’s available at that time—2 a.m. on Christmas Eve, or whatever. A junior engineer should be able to kick this stuff off and at least get it up and running,” said Dovyak.
Additionally, increasing security concerns were influencing their DR planning. The company felt that they needed to address ransomware threats in addition to some of the less man-made aspects of DR, like a power outage or natural disaster.
The Solution: Arpio’s automated DR platform
When Scotts Miracle-Gro adopted Arpio’s DR platform, they did away with custom scripts and intensive resourcing in favor of automation that requires less specific expertise. With Arpio, any IT engineer or sysadmin on the team can now manage DR processes reliably and independently.
Arpio also enabled consistent configuration detection and updates and provided automatic load balancer syncing to prevent discrepancies between prod and DR environments.
The Scotts Miracle-Gro team leaned on Arpio to support secure cross-region and cross-account recovery with air-gapped environments. “Whatever you’re recovering, you pretty much have to isolate it and verify that the image you recovered is not actually corrupted…or doesn’t have that potential vulnerability from that compromise. With traditional DR, you don’t really have that option,” said Dovyak.
Arpio orchestrates total application recovery in the airgapped recovery account, so their workload is safe to recover even if the source environment is compromised by a bad actor. There was an organizational mandate to include ransomware protection in their DR strategy, and Scotts Miracle-Gro’s internal security team supports it.
Highlights of Scotts Miracle-Gro’s Arpio implementation:
- Supported ~70 workloads, including critical systems like SAP
- Integration into a siloed, cross-account AWS architecture to isolate DR environments
- MTTR improvement from 3 days to “a few hours”
The Result: Fast, Painless, and Robust DR Testing
With Arpio, Scotts Miracle-Gro’s mean time to recovery (MTTR) dropped from three long days to just a few hours. Arpio’s push-button testing means they are able to easily validate DR: if a test is initiated in the morning, they’re “basically done by lunch, and the team gets their time back to work on their day-to-day jobs for the rest of the day.” Then, the next day, the application testers perform their testing and validate their individual apps.
“Before Arpio, we could spend two whole days just trying to recover the technical aspects of the recovery—not even any of the app testing or verification,” said Dovyak. “Since we deployed Arpio, that headache has basically disappeared.”
Arpio reduced the technical and emotional intensity of their DR tests, too. In the past, Dovyak said, it felt like they were fighting multiple fires, all while trying to be mindful of the recovery time. “But now, I click a button, recover, and then I’m just waiting for it to finish. And you can go on and start some other exercise steps and not have to be constantly babysitting it,” he said.
Since Scotts Miracle-Gro adopted Arpio, every DR test has succeeded with little organizational effort or toil; by contrast, previous tests succeeded but were painful to run. Because the broader infrastructure team can now run DR tests, there’s less dependency on specific personnel. And the DR strategy has expanded to manmade disasters, providing ransomware resilience with proactive measures against compromised source accounts and data.
When it comes to budget justification, Scotts Miracle-Gro considers Arpio a vital expense. Scotts Miracle-Gro has also been impressed by Arpio’s customer service. “The team’s been excellent and responsive every time,” said Dovyak. “What you typically see with other services is a kind of bait and switch, where you only get the really good support right off the bat. We’ve never had that problem with Aprio. And this has been a partnership for years now.”
He added, “We’ve been extremely satisfied with the product.”
Lessons Learned and Looking Ahead
The Scotts Miracle-Gro team has learned a lot from overcoming their DR challenges with Arpio.
The biggest one: Automating DR reduces business risk—and organizational stress.
You shouldn’t wait for a disaster to modernize your DR plan. Your DR strategy has to evolve alongside emerging cloud and security threats. For example, including ransomware scenarios in DR planning helps future-proof your organization for resilience.
Scotts Miracle-Gro plans to run their DR testing twice per year, in April and October, and will continue to collaborate with Aprio for their evolving needs.
Learn more about how Arpio can simplify and secure your disaster recovery strategy. Contact Arpio, book a demo, and read more customer stories!
