With the help of a data recovery solution from Stellar, Airtel West Bengal-Odisha circle now can recover lost data completely
By KTP Radhika
In an age where data is one of the key pillars of existence for entities, the relevance of data security is paramount, to say the least. But in hi-tech working environment, chances of data loss are rather high given the fragility of the systems. Loss of data not just hampers daily operations of an organization but also poses a threat to the safety of confidential company data. It is even critical in highly competitive sectors such as telecommunication since service providers cannot take any risk of a data loss.
Bharti Airtel, the world’s third largest mobile telecommunications company with about 270 million subscribers across 20 countries and the largest cellular service provider in India with 200 million subscribers, is one company that gives data the topmost priority. Airtel’s West Bengal-Odisha (WBO) circle is one of important circles for the company, which includes Kolkata where they first launched 4G services using TD-LTE technology in India.
Customer data, businesses data with different marketing heads, various analytical data etc are the back bone of their business. However, whenever a data loss incident happens, the company faced a major challenge in recovering the information back and run the business smoothly. “Normally, in our kind of businesses, data is of paramount importance. We have important data that resides in our servers and individual laptops,” says Amitabh Deb Choudhury Head – IT, WBO, Bharti Airtel.
“There have been incidences of system crashes and data corruption and our important data has been lost.” Many a time, the company faced instances of severe data loss which caused major business damage and faced difficulties in serving customers efficiently.
Whenever a data loss event occurs, Airtel used to contact local support services and data recovery vendors to retrieve the data. However, they were having a lukewarm response. Most of the time, the percentage of data recovery was very less. Also, the turnaround time used to be so huge that some times, the data used to be recovered much later that it was supposed to. That was when the management decided to approach Gurgaon based Stellar Data Recovery. “Till May last year, we were using local services and software; but it didn’t help us in getting back the critical part of our data.” This was when the company launched 4G services in Kolkata and it could not afford data loss of any degree. “We did a market study and talked with a lot of industry veterans and got very good feed backs about Stellar’s solutions and services. More over many of our employees had used Stellar services for their individual purpose and were much satisfied,” explains Choudhury.
Back end of recovery
From May 2012 onwards, Airtel WBO circle did not face any problems in data recovery. According to Airtel, Stellar has a very good infrastructure to retrieve lost data. Manoj Dhingra, Director-Domestic Business, Stellar Data Recovery, explains the whole process. “Anything can go wrong any time with the system servers and solid state drives, individual laptops or even with USB when data storage is concerned. Whenever a data recovery requirement arises, we will collect certain information like what led to the crash, what kind of problem they are facing and then analyze for the possibilities of data recovery.” The company then tells the customer about how much percentage of data can be recovered.”
A data loss event can occur because of a variety of reasons. One of the common reasons is human error like somebody accidentally deleting the data or formatting the disk or cases like hardware failure can cause data loss. Physical events such as flood or security threats also cause major data loss many times. Dhingra elaborates, “To retrieve maximum amount of data we need specialized infrastructure — data recovery services. We have class 100 clean lab rooms (which has less than one hundred dust particles of size less than .5 microns per cubic foot of air) maintain a specialized environment under which hard disks are manufactured.” The same environment is required for successful data recovery purposes from any type of logical/physical crash scenario because if dust particles happen to touch the platter (a hard disk component where the data is stored) while opening the hard disk, data will be completely removed and cannot be recovered.
Stellar’s data recovery process works in two ways. For a logical crash, where the media is working but some files cannot be accessed due to accidental deletion/formatting or a virus attack or corruption, data can be retrieved using data recovery software. However, if a physical damage occurs, for instance, a short circuit happened, or hard drive has fallen or burnt, the media should be opened inside the lab and data recovery process should be made. Stellar has specific and specialized solutions for laptops, desktops, servers, solid state drives or even for USB drives.
Stellar benefits
Airtel has faced several server and individual system crashes and data loss after May last year. However, with the support of Stellar, they were able to retrieve almost about 100% of their data. Choudhury states, “Before opting for Stellar we were not able to recover more than 30-40 % of our lost data. But now we are able to recover almost 100% of our data if an event happens.”
Another beneficial factor is the turnaround time is also much fast. “Earlier it would take more than 10 days. Now we get the data back within two to three days, depending on the intensity of the mishap. We haven’t found any other partner who can provide data recovery within this short span,” Choudhury observes. Obviously, Airtel was much satisfied by the services provided by Stellar. It also increased their corporate efficiency and helped them in venturing into new market because it has given them a lot of security.
After the success in WBO circle, some of the other Airtel circles have started using Stellar’s data recovery solution. Circles such as Gujarat, Bihar and Jharkhand are now using Stellar solutions and many other circles are planning to use them in future.
