GILM Is Raising the Bar on Security Operations
Grupo Industrial LM (GILM), a consortium of manufacturing companies based in Northern Mexico, has undergone significant digital transformation in recent years. To ensure that security measures keep pace with their digital evolution, the team at GILM recently launched an initiative to implement the Center for Internet Security’s Critical Security Controls.
The CIS controls provide a maturity framework for organizations to defend their computing infrastructures from a broad base of security threats. Similar to most security programs, these controls focus not just on prevention, but also on recovery should a catastrophic security incident take place. CIS Control 11 (Data Recovery) stipulates that organizations should “establish and maintain data recovery practices sufficient to restore in-scope enterprise assets to a pre-incident and trusted state.”
Disaster Recovery for SAP on AWS was a Gap
It was during this exercise that GILM recognized a gap in their recovery capabilities for their SAP HANA workloads deployed in AWS. Should a cyber event or ransomware attack occur, they needed confidence that these business critical workloads could be securely recovered in a timely manner. And because an AWS environment is much more than a set of virtual machines, they needed to go beyond traditional server backup to ensure they could restore their entire environment.
Once this need had been identified, the team began to research solutions. It was important to the business to close this gap quickly, but they also needed a solution that would meet the business’s recovery time and recovery point objectives. To these ends, GILM evaluated a variety of products including traditional enterprise backup tools and virtual machine DR solutions. They also considered engaging a contractor to build a custom solution. After researching these options, though, they realized that none of them adequately dealt with the complexity of their cloud-hosted environment.
Enter Arpio’s AWS-Native DR Solution
Arpio is an industry-leading DR solution for businesses whose critical applications reside in AWS. Built on AWS’s best practices and native capabilities, Arpio is the only solution on the market that understands the complexity of an AWS workload and protects the entire environment – not just the data stores.
The GILM team first discovered Arpio in the AWS Marketplace, and they were intrigued by the promise of a solution that was purpose built for the needs of AWS environments. But they also needed a solution that could ensure recoverability of a complex enterprise workload like SAP. And they were looking not just for a product, but also a partner who could collaborate with them to ensure their success. They would need to see and experience the product first hand.
The team engaged Arpio for a product demo and quickly recognized the dramatic difference from other vendors. “From the beginning, we were impressed with Arpio. The team was friendly and transparent, and the software was very easy to use,” said Paulino Faz, GILM – IT Corporate Manager. “Other companies we spoke with felt more bureaucratic and slower moving. With Arpio, we had answers very quickly.”
Proof of Value Delivered in Minutes
Once they’d seen the product and their questions were answered, the GILM team was ready to conduct a proof of concept (POC).
A typical Arpio POC is a 2-week engagement where an initial workload is protected and tested so that successful DR is achieved. The POC is launched during a 1-hour onboarding session where Arpio is connected to the AWS environment and disaster recovery is configured. After that session, Arpio replicates the environment and an initial test can be run. The end-to-end process can be completed in an afternoon.
The POC at GILM went even faster. The goal of the 1-hour session was to configure the first of 4 SAP environments in Arpio. This was accomplished with time to spare, so a second SAP environment, for a second subsidiary, was configured as well.
The simplicity of Arpio put GILM way ahead of schedule. “When we started looking for a solution to DR our SAP HANA workloads, we never imagined it could be so easy,” Paulino said. “We had scheduled several weeks to test our full recovery capability, and suddenly we had a solution in under an hour.”
The last phase of the POC involved validating that the replicated environments could be relied upon to recover their SAP workloads. Testing DR with Arpio involves launching the recovery environment while the production environment continues to service production traffic. There’s no need to perform a DR test during a maintenance window. With an easy push-button operation and no risk to production, the GILM team was able to use Arpio to restore the entire SAP workload to the recovery environment in a matter of minutes. Once the system was running, they connected to the servers, validated that the SAP services were online and healthy, and smoke tested the application to ensure complete functionality.
Complete DR for SAP Made Easy
In the time remaining in their POC, GILM onboarded the two remaining SAP workloads for a total of 4 and validated that each was successfully recoverable. Their POC hadn’t just proven value; it had delivered a complete solution. “We had planned 3 months for the project. In the end, everything was set up and tested in a week,” said Oscar Reyes Mata, GILM – IT SAP-Basis Manager.
Beyond ease of set up, the GILM team was also pleasantly surprised that Arpio could far outperform their RPO goal of 12 hours. In fact, thanks to the sophistication of Arpio’s automation and orchestration, GILM’s SAP HANA workloads are now achieving an RPO of under an hour. And the recent addition of real-time data replication to the Arpio product means that an RPO of mere seconds is a simple configuration change, if desired.
With a solid BCDR plan for their SAP HANA workloads in place, the team at GILM was able to report the outcomes of their CIS Security audit to the executive team with confidence.
“We are very happy with the simplicity and great reliability of the solution,” says Paulino.
Key Metrics of Disaster Recovery Plan with Arpio
- Achieved a 90% improvement in RPO for business critical applications when able to shift from a backup every 12 hours to an RPO of under an hour
- Implemented and validated DR for their AWS-hosted SAP HANA workloads in 1/12th of the planned time
