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ECU Worldwide’s Intelligent System Ensures 24/7 Global Supply Chain Resilience

ECU Worldwide ensures 24/7 global supply chain resilience with Commvault® Cloud Rewind™

A global leader in LCL consolidation de-risks its cloud strategy with Commvault® Cloud Rewind™ to support customer service excellence.

Minimized downtime and uninterrupted operations

Simplified compliance and risk mitigation

Lower recovery cost and reduced business risk

400+ TB

of cloud-based data secured

<15 minutes

recovery point objective for cloud applications, data, and virtual networks

<4 hours

Recovery time objective for cloud applications, data, and virtual networks

CHALLENGE

Needed to improve service quality while operating in a highly competitive, low-margin global logistics market.
Relied on seven regional data centers and manual backup and recovery, increasing risk of extended downtime.
Faced business impact if critical data and systems became unavailable, putting customer satisfaction at risk.

SOLUTION

.Migrated production environments to cloud platforms including Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
Deployed Commvault® Cloud Rewind™ to enable fast, robust recovery from outages.
Enabled full-stack disaster recovery across compute, network, and storage without additional parallel DR setups.

RESULTS

Achieved an RPO of less than 15 minutes, to minimize data loss and reduce interruption impact.
Simplified recovery processes through extensive automation, providing an RTO of under four hours, facilitating faster and smoother restoration of operations.
Maintained availability of critical logistics applications, preventing IT disruptions from escalating into customer dissatisfaction, thereby protecting service quality.

DELIVERING A TRULY GLOBAL SERVICE

Founded in 1987, logistics company ECU Worldwide has been delivering customer satisfaction on a global scale for more than four decades. With competition heating up in the logistics and transportation sector, and companies increasingly competing on razor-thin margins, ECU Worldwide is focused on ensuring cost optimization and consistent quality across all aspects of its business.

Traditionally, ECU Worldwide supported its global operations by hosting its data and applications within seven datacenters located at the company’s strategic regional container freight station hubs. However, maintaining and managing production, testing, back up and disaster recovery (DR) environments – in addition to virtual networks – across multiple locations demanded frequent upscaling of IT infrastructure, while the subsequent procurement, configuration and deployment processes created significant workloads for IT teams.

To reduce capital expenses, drive down operational costs, and reduce IT administration, ECU Worldwide looked at a possible move to cloud computing, while simultaneously improving system availability and enhancing customer service.

SECURED AND PROTECTED ENVIRONMENTS

Protects Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Oracle Cloud, and Citrix environments, which host applications such as Microsoft 365, TIBCO MDM, Salesforce, Darwinbox, and an in-house developed ERP system, Topaz.

Secures over 400 TB of cloud-based data, including production, test, and development environments, enterprise data lakes, and business-critical transactional data.

STRIKING A BALANCE WITH A NEW STRATEGY

Aware that even with a move to the cloud the possibility of system downtime continued to exist, ECU Worldwide aimed to de-risk and impact of outages. The company therefore planned to make the move to the cloud, and retain and re-use its physical data centers as backup and disaster recovery (DR) sites.

On closer examination, though, the complexity of backing up complex and dynamic cloud applications to the physical DR environment would be incredibly costly, effectively canceling out any potential savings by downsizing its data center footprint. ECU Worldwide’s IT team was, therefore, left unclear on the best way to balance disaster avoidance with the new cloud strategy.

SIMPLIFYING DISASTER RECOVERY IN THE CLOUD

ECU Worldwide reached out to long-term business partner Neutron Backup, which highly recommended Commvault® Cloud Rewind™. Neutron Backup highlighted the flexibility of Cloud Rewind by showcasing its ability to recover cloud environments from multiple cloud services providers, including three of the world’s largest hyperscalers.

“Commvault is always forward-looking in its approach,” explains Sudhakar Nagandla, Head of IT Infrastructure and Cloud at ECU Worldwide. “When we looked at Cloud Rewind, we were immediately impressed with Commvault’s focus on the disaster avoidance challenges of tomorrow, both in terms of enabling continuous business and recovering systems quickly in the cloud era.”

Using real-world data, Neutron Backup ran a detailed Proof of Concept, and showcased the solution’s ability to automate common manual interventions in the pre- and post-DR moment, alongside its capability to recover virtual networks in minutes with the click of a button.

“Neutron Backup and Commvault grabbed our attention when we learned that Cloud Rewind could support many different cloud environments, especially as we planned to use a range of cloud providers in the regions we operate in,” explains Sudakhar. “And when we learned that Cloud Rewind supports a bring-your-own- license model, which would help us to take some previous investments in on premises software licenses to the cloud, we decided to explore the Commvault solution further.”

As an international organization, ECU Worldwide has a particularly complex IT environment, and working with vendors and partners that understand this complexity is crucial to its success.

Sudhakar reflects: “After seeing that we could recover virtual networks with minimal manual intervention, we knew that Cloud Rewind was the perfect solution for us, as many of our employees and partners around the world depend on fast, reliable access to virtual networks every day to keep operations running smoothly.”

REDUCING COSTS AND SECURING CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

Even at the early stages of the cloud migration, ECU Worldwide achieved significant savings by reducing the total cost of ownership associated with managing and maintaining an extensive network of datacenters.

Where the previous DR environment only covered 30% of the production load, Cloud Rewind covers the entire environment – and at 39% lower cost.

“With Cloud Rewind, we no longer need to maintain a dedicated physical DR site, but we still get the benefit of fast DR if we need to bring cloud systems back after unplanned disruption,” explains Sudhakar. “The solution has transformed our DR strategy with an air gap and clean room approach. What’s more, recovery using Cloud Rewind is much faster than relying on physical DR because the solution automates many key tasks – from restoring data to replicating virtual network configurations. This means we can spend more time uncovering the root causes of downtime, instead of focusing all our efforts in getting systems back online.”

Using Cloud Rewind, ECU Worldwide has successfully achieved a recovery point objective (RPO) of less than 15 minutes and a recovery time objective (RTO) of under four hours for its cloud-based applications, data and virtual networks.

Sudhakar concludes: “At ECU Worldwide, operating in the competitive logistics sector requires us to balance cost efficiency with service excellence. Previously, our reliance on regional datacenters meant slow, manual recovery processes that increased downtime and costs. Commvault Cloud Rewind has transformed this by automating crucial recovery tasks, from data restoration to network configuration. The solution’s speed and automation have dramatically reduced our recovery time, ensuring we maintain the high service levels our customers expect.”