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CROWNE PLAZA® CHANGI AIRPORT

Crowne Plaza® Changi Airport is an award-winning hotel located at Terminal 3 of Singapore Changi Airport. Seamless connectivity to all terminals and Mass Rapid Transit (MRT), Crowne Plaza® Changi Airport provides premium accommodation, a 24-hour fitness centre, a beautifully landscaped outdoor pool, 24-hour business services, spa services and a variety of dining options that enable guests to be productive, connected, rested and restored. 


An IHG hotel, Crowne Plaza® Changi Airport has been named World’s Best Airport Hotel at the Skytrax World Airport Awards (2015 - 2017), the Best Airport Hotel at the TTG Travel Awards 2015 and 2016, and Travel Weekly Asia Readers' Choice Awards 2016.


With a total capacity of 563 rooms, Crowne Plaza® Changi Airport is poised to cater to an increasing number of visitors to Singapore as Changi Airport continues to grow as a key regional aviation hub with the opening of Terminal 4 and upcoming developments such as Jewel Changi Airport, as well as  with the tripartite collaboration between Singapore Tourism Board, Changi Airport Group and Royal Caribbean to bring in more fly-cruise tourists to Singapore.

 

The Challenge

Crowne Plaza® Changi Airport used a tape backup system to backup their production data to ensure that the data could be recovered if there was a hard disk crash or failure. There were inherent challenges associated with this backup strategy:

1.    Long Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

In the event of a disaster, data recovery can take time and any potential delay in recovery time could cause serious disruptions to their operations. 

2.    Long Recovery Point Objective (RPO) 
Due to the huge amount of network resources required for the tape backup solution, backup was executed only once in a day. In the event of a disaster, Crowne Plaza® Changi Airport could potentially lose their critical production data.

3.    No Assurance on Recoverability of Backup Data on Tapes 
It is difficult to validate the backup data stored on backup tapes. Hence, a more robust solution will be required to ensure backup data is available in the event of recovery.  

4.    Physically Delivering Additional Set of Backup data to Secondary Location

The duplicated set of backup data were usually transported via a delivery van from the primary location to another location once in a while. As this is not done in a daily basis, in the event of a disaster at their primary location, they could lose some of their business data.

Clearly identifying the risks and challenges associated with their current backup strategy, Mr Ericson Guina, IT Manager of Crowne Plaza® Changi Airport, began to lead the efforts to address them.
 

 

The Solutions

1.    Advanced Sector Based Snapshot Disk to Disk Based Backup Solution with the following capabilities:

a.    High Frequency Backup

The sector based snapshot backup solution is able to make backup effective in seconds and not impacting the operation of the servers and network resources.  Thus, the backup solution is able to do high frequency backup at 15 minutes intervals.  The removal of tape backup and implementation of disk based solution achieved more copies of backup throughout the day.

b.    Rapid Recovery

The new solution implemented is capable of virtual booting a production server from backup images. Allowing instant mount of any backup content for fast and easy granular restoration, the virtual booting process only takes minutes to fire up a production server. 

c.    Backup Archives

Backup is archived every 15 minutes for 3 months and daily for 1 year and monthly for up to 10 years. This allows for file retrieval or system restore to a specific point in time. This is especially useful in guarding against malware like ransomware. 

 

2.    Automated Real Time Replication of Backup Data to a Secondary Location

Critical backup images are replicated offsite to ensure that image and folder backups are immediately and automatically transferred and stored safely away from the primary location. This completely automated process eliminates the need for human intervention in the backup process.
 

 

Outcomes

1.    Rapid Recovery – Reduced Recovery Time Objective (RTO) to 15 Minutes 

Crowne Plaza® Changi Airport will be able to recover files from backup server and resume normal operations within minutes as compared to hours during an event of mishap, minimizing the downtime. 

2.    Improved Recovery Point Objective (RPO) to 15 Minutes 

Backup windows has improved significantly with the newly implemented backup solution in place. Instead of spending hours to backup the data, the hotel can now backup data within seconds. With the frequent and short backup intervals, the Recovery point objective (RPO) of the hotelhas been improved. As the periodic backup is set as low as every 15 minutes, the amount of the data loss during a disaster will be reduced to minutes instead of hours.This will maximise business continuity and achieved minimal data loss in the event of disaster such as a fire or flood.

3.    Disk Based Backup &Platform Independent Restoration

Reduce dependency on physical server specification, the reliant on hardware is reduced as restoration is independent of physical server. Backup data is verified daily for restorability. Backup image is restorable to any platform (physical and virtual) to maximise recoverability and minimise recovery time.

4.    Improved Business Resilience with Another Set of Business Data at a Secondary Location

Critical backup data is replicated to a secondary site as soon as the backup images are created.With this additional set of backup data at the secondary location, it minimizes a disaster's effect on the hotel's data. In the event of a disaster at the primary location, they can still recover using the data located at the secondary location.

5.    Safeguarding Against Malware like Ransomware

Backup and archival of data at short intervals protect the business from the full blown effects of malware like ransomware. In the event of a ransomware attack, the hotel is able to roll back its systems and files to the time before the attack and retrieve its critical data

 

Not only has Adventus proposed and delivered a state-of-the-art solution to fulfil our backup needs, the execution was smooth and worry-free, says Ericson Guina, IT Manager, Crowne Plaza® Changi Airport

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