For almost 50 years, WFS (Worldwide Flight Services) has successfully built up its name as one of the world’s prominent suppliers of air cargo as well as ground management services for the airlines & airports. In order to uphold their reputation along with meeting the rising demand, WFS needs to maintain availability of great IT structures while meeting severe security guidelines by government. Any downtime might effect in an incapability to screen as well as load cargo that may perhaps lead to monetary losses, damage of reputation & possible U.S. Duties fines.

After assessing several options for disaster recovery, WFS had made ceratin to enter into the partnership a

For almost 50 years, WFS (Worldwide Flight Services) has successfully built up its name as one of the world’s prominent suppliers of air cargo as well as ground management services for the airlines & airports. In order to uphold their reputation along with meeting the rising demand, WFS needs to maintain availability of great IT structures while meeting severe security guidelines by government. Any downtime might effect in an incapability to screen as well as load cargo that may perhaps lead to monetary losses, damage of reputation & possible U.S. Duties fines.

After assessing several options for disaster recovery, WFS had made ceratin to enter into the partnership along with the EagleDream Technologies so as to plan an enterprise-mark, disaster recovery strategy based upon cloud. Moreover, collectively WFS and EagleDream has decided to influence CloudEndure Disaster Recovery to AWS. WFS is now capable of meeting belligerent RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives) as well as RTOs (Recovery Time Objectives) that wasn’t easily achievable otherwise.

Company Overview

WFS is a prominent cargo shipping company across the globe, focusing over ground management of the air cargo designed for airports, airlines as well as passengers. Operational in nearly 300 airlines plus airports across the globe, the firm successfully meets firm governmental security guidelines meant for carefully & securely handling of more than 4 million tons of air cargo every single year.

EagleDream Technologies is an Advanced Consulting Partner of AWS, assisting customers with the development of safe cloud application. EagleDream depends upon several years of capability in terms of data centers, hybrid systems, virtual transformations and the cloud so as to benefit customization of accurate solution for customers’ trades that includes migration of their loads of developing safe disaster recovery strategies, along with setting up well-designed podiums within AWS.

Challenges faced by the Company

As WFS functions in nearly hundreds of airports globally, it needs to be acquiescent with all the security guidelines as needed by the U.S. Customs plus the TSA. Furthermore, all of their tenders should meet the regulatory norms defined by ruling bodies, and novel standards of PCI compliance aimed at safe and sound handling of consumer’s transactions by credit card.

The North American IT Infrastructure of WFS along with the Network Team, led by Gwen Schulze, remains accountable for facilitating the overall infrastructure of nearly 130 sites & 50 warehouses around the United States as well as Canada — upholding all the servers, network, Active Directory and every individual devices (like laptop, desktop & mobile devices).

Almost a year back, Schulze acknowledged that their manufacturing setting was at complete risk deprived of a sufficient disaster recovery plan been prepared: “In case our arrangements get down, we will not be capable of functioning.” She also described that an IT disaster may perhaps indicate that “we cannot protect cargo, thus we would not place cargo over the plane, and hence the trade will be paused. We will have to bear loses in terms of finances, probable clients, as well as it will probably be a domino result.”

While assessing disaster recovery resolutions on premise data centers for the WFS’s North America’s business, Schulze required a way out that offered aggressive, almost nil data loss goals for every busy servers, comprising of IBM MQ servers as well as SQL. She even required to protect time & resources of the company while developing a subordinate site for the recovery. Once done with thorough research along with determining the operation & set-up costs of several disaster recovery possibilities, she decided for teaming up along with EagleDream so as to execute an AWS-cohesive disaster recovery resolution that will also be feasible for disposition with further future IT projects.

The Solution

EagleDream’s Cloud Solutions Director- Scott Weber, primarily held meetings with the several disaster recovery dealers’ prior initiating the designing process of a WFS solution. He clarifies, “We had uninterrupted technical meetings along with several vendors of other disaster recovery, also stated them straight the level of RPOs as well as RTOs that we requisite. Fortunately, they all were open with us & told that they just cannot meet with the given numbers, hence there has been no point at all moving ahead with anybody except CloudEndure.”

Weber along with Schulze then started forecasting operation of CloudEndure Disaster Recovery tools. “As soon as we started considering CloudEndure, it seemed like a impeccable solution as it has been a block-level replica of the whole thing, thus the OS may perhaps existed there, data loss will be negligible, and we might imitate the controller of our domain,” explicated Schulze.

As no other dealer possibly will come close by in terms of meeting their objectives for recovery, the POC along with CloudEndure was simple to initiate the implementation of solution with a big web server. Schulze detailed that “the minute the web server remained imitated, we transported it up in AWS to observe how it essentially came up, as well as it seemed great. It was certainly seamless.” Then they started an iterative procedure of duplicating the continuing servers, along with “the whole thing running efficiently.”

The Domino effect

“As much as our analysis has showed, entirety is functioning as predictable,” Weber states. WFS as well as EagleDream’s key concern when opening the disaster recovery project had been their IBM WebSphere MQ server that Weber clarified is “an extremely focused portion of expertise that not many people are acquainted with, plus is a vital component to the whole lot that is done by WFS’s system.”