Featured Webinar: How Karaikal Port plans to use an email archive as an information and knowledge repository to increase productivity
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In this webinar, speakers from Mithi, Amazon and Karaikal Port share their experiences and insights to leave you with actionable information on the fundamentals of Email Archiving to the cloud, how Ediscovery is more than just a compliance tool, ensuring quick recovery from any malicious attack or accidents and how AWS infrastructure is so Elastic. Learn More: http://bit.ly/2wM5tn3 Topics covered during the webinar: *Fundamentals of Email Archiving to the cloud *How Vaultastic, a true SaaS can help *Ediscovery - more than just a compliance tool *Customer speak on how Karaikal Port gained peace of mind by archiving mail to Vaultastic *Amazon speak on how AWS infrastructure is so Elastic *Q and A Session
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Featured Webinar: How Karaikal Port plans to use an email archive as an information and knowledge repository to increase productivity
- 1. How Karaikal Port plans to use email archive as an information & knowledge repository to gain team productivity Welcome to the webinar! Duration: 1 hour, starting at 3 PM IST, including 15-min Q&A Guest Speakers Our Speaker Mr. Krishnan Mani Solutions Architect Amazon Internet Services Pvt. ltd. Mr. Sunil Uttam Co Founder Mithi Software Technologies Mr. Suresh V DGM - IT Karaikal Port Private Limited
- 2. In this webinar, we’ll talk about Fundamentals of Email Archiving to the cloud How Vaultastic, a true SaaS can help Ediscovery – more than just a compliance tool Customer speak on How Karaikal Port gained peace of mind by archiving mail to Vaultastic Amazon speak on how AWS infrastructure is so Elastic You Ask we Answer
- 3. Keeping a read-only copy of every mail sent and received by your users in an email vault. What is Email Archiving?
- 4. 60% of business critical information is stored exclusively in email - IDC 4GB is the average annual growth in a user's archive account -Mithi 126 messages are expected to be sent and received, on average, per business user per day, by the end of 2019 – Radicati So, a 200 user company will accumulate more than 1 TB of data in 1 year and this will keep growing year after year. The Trend today
- 5. It’s a Digital Economy Now and Data is more valuable than ever before. Keep Business Email Safe on the Cloud Why Archive Email #1
- 6. Why Archive Email #2 60% Critical data is in Email. Do more with it. Discover useful information, Recover ‘lost’ information, Uncover valuable data, Gain insights
- 7. Why Archive Email #3 Managing Risks and ensuring Compliance is critical to a disruption free business Store email in Tamper Proof vaults, Search and Export selectively.
- 8. Why Archive Email #4 Old Methods have run their course & are a Drain on productivity Simplify Email Management.
- 9. Data Security and Availability is critical to business continuity. Extreme Data Durability: 99.99999999999% Why Archive Email #5
- 10. Migrating Large Volumes of Data is slow, challenging and vendor dependent Access archived email during Outages, Down times and Migrations Why Archive Email #6
- 11. Improves service performance Hierarchical Storage Architecture Why Archive Email #7
- 12. How does email archiving work?
- 13. Why Archive Emails on the Cloud?
- 14. Cloud Archiving Benefit #1 Data on a separate operational Infrastructure
- 15. Cloud Archiving Benefit #2 Robust, High performance and Scalable platform
- 16. Cloud Archiving Benefit #3 99.99999999999%
- 17. Cloud Archiving Benefit #4 No infrastructure
- 18. Why Vaultastic?
- 19. True SaaS • Pay as You Go • Self Service • No Infrastructure • SLA backed warranties • Strong Data Integrity
- 20. Secure Platform Strong Global Certifications, Millions of customers, SLAs, Shared Security Model, Encrypted Storage Secure Application Tamper Proof Archives, Encrypted Vault, Encrypted transmission, Role based admin, Strong Audit trails. Total Security
- 21. In-line email archiving Archive before Delivery
- 22. Works with Zimbra, Lotus Notes, Mdaemon, MS Exchange, Postfix, Office 365, G Suite and other on-premise as well as cloud email solutions Cross Platform
- 23. Elastic Infinite Storage Unlimited Storage
- 24. • Options for Bulk data import and Export using AWS Snowball • Individual users can Export data in PST or EML • Historical email data in EML or PST format can be uploaded to Vaultastic Easy Data in Easy Data out
- 25. Pay only for what you use Flexible Mixed Plans
- 26. Leverage all that accumulated data to drive decisions EDiscovery e
- 27. • Powerful Indexed search across archive mailboxes • Find any information, no matter how old, in seconds • Leverage all that accumulated data to drive decisions, gain insights • Respond to compliance requests instantly What is Ediscovery? e
- 28. • Show me all mail sent by Rohit to external domains and which contain a pdf attachment • Show me all mail sent in April to this domain • Show me all communication between Mary and Acmecorp for the last 7 years. • Show me all mail where an attachement contains “contract” Sample Ediscovery Queries e
- 29. • Analyzing quality of communication • Automated breach discovery • Common issues reported to customer support • All proposals sent out to prospects • All GST related communication in and out Real Ediscovery use cases e
- 30. Karaikal Port – Using email archive as an information & knowledge repository Mr. Suresh V DGM - IT Karaikal Port Private Limited
- 31. Karaikal Port Business • Karaikal is a private port located near the town of Karaikal in the Union Territory of Pondicherry and was commissioned in April 2009 • The post has handled 1313 vessels from 2009 to 2017 • The strategic location of Karaikal port allows easy access to the industrial rich hinterland of Tamil Nadu
- 32. Mailing Setup • Karaikal Port consume Mithi’s cloud email service, SkyConnect with no in premise infrastructure. • Users access email via MS Outlook, Baya and mobile • Email of critical users is backed up by downloading and retaining mails on respective PCs in MS Outlook as PSTs
- 33. The Requirement • Guaranteed safety of all internal and external mail communication in a single place • Quick and easy recovery of all mails from portable devices for information and knowledge access
- 34. Solution • Vaultastic ensures automatic email backup, directly from the primary mail platform • Karaikal can freely clean primary mailboxes with no need to backup on individual accounts • Karaikal teams now refer to Vaultastic to access earlier mail, up to 7 years • No need for any infrastructure or intervention from the Karaikal teams • All mails are searchable instantly
- 35. Conclusion Vaultatic has greatly improved the productivity of our Organisation. All our mail is safely stored in a central location on the cloud. There is no longer a need of storing PST backups locally Our knowledge repository is quickly accessible through Ediscovery, increasing organisational learning
- 36. How the AWS infrastructure is so Elastic? Mr. Krishnan Mani Solutions Architect Amazon Internet Services Pvt. ltd. Email: krishman@amazon.com
- 37. AWS Storage Over a decade’s experience providing high scale, enterprise-ready storage services Hybrid Cloud Storage Infrastructure Migration Platforms and Solutions Storage Ecosystem
- 38. Batches and Streams Direct Connect Snowball data transport 3rd Party Connectors Transfer Acceleration Storage Gateway Kinesis Firehose File Amazon EFS Block Amazon EBS (persistent) Object Amazon GlacierAmazon S3 Amazon EC2 Instance Store (ephemeral) AWS Storage Platform and Solutions
- 39. AWS Direct Connect AWS Snowball ISV Connectors Amazon Kinesis Firehose S3 Transfer Acceleration AWS Storage Gateway More Ways to Transfer Data into Amazon S3 AWS Snowmobile AWS Snowball Edge
- 41. Amazon S3 in use • Customers storing billions of objects and exabytes of data • Most durable and reliable platform for your data • High performance at massive scale • Easy and flexible data transfer • Most comprehensive suite of security and compliance capabilities • Query data in place • Broadest and deepest ecosystem
- 42. Elasticity on AWS • All operations on AWS to provision, re-configure, or let go of resources using any of the services are API operations that customers can complete in seconds or minutes • No upfront provisioning required, no minimums, no commitments when you use any of the AWS services. Customers pay for services based on usage • AWS continuously adds capacity in excess of demand to ensure that customers have headroom to grow
- 43. Compute on AWS Virtual machines with EC2 • Provision any number of EC2 instances of different instance types in any AWS region (subject to limits that can be changed on request) • Also ensure instances are available when needed with a reservation for lower prices • Take advantage of lower costs with spot instances • Use Auto Scaling Groups to grow and shrink instance fleets automatically based on need • Elastic Load Balancing scales automatically to serve traffic
- 44. Triad of Services Latency Utilization CloudWatchAuto Scaling Elastic Load Balancing Auto Scaling group Execute AS Policy © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
- 45. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved. instances Auto Scaling group Scale Out Amazon CloudWatch Scheduled Event Scale In Amazon CloudWatch Scheduled Event Launch Instance Attach to Group Detach from Group Terminate Instance X Auto Scaling Basic Lifecycle
- 46. Take advantage of new computing models Develop without worrying about servers to manage Setup your code to run in response to a variety of triggers Code is executed on demand with continuous scaling Pay only for the time used with sub-second metering Serverless architectures free you from managing infrastructure AWS Lambda MLBAM uses AWS Lambda to support the analysis of data feeds in MLB Statcast’s metrics engine. It takes the raw data, cleans it up and conducts error detection, then creates the metrics that bring more insights into plays; all within 12 seconds of a play.
- 47. Storage on AWS Never require provisioning for storage with S3, or archiving with Glacier • Single object can be as large as 5 TB • 100 S3 buckets allowed per customer account • Unlimited number of objects per bucket • S3 APIs automatically and routinely scale to large number of operations per second
- 48. Build for speed, build for scale Consistent, single-digit millisecond latency NoSQL database at any scale Highly Scalable Fully ManagedFast, Consistent Performance Event-driven Programming Fine-grained Access Control Document & Key-Value Structures Amazon DynamoDB BMW built its new car-as-a-sensor service in only six months using DynamoDB and other services. With AWS, it can adapt to rapidly changing load requirements that can scale up and down by two orders of magnitude within 24 hours and will process data from 100,000 cars by 2018. BMW
- 49. Hybrid cloud storage in your environment TieringBurstingMigration Single Batch Recurring Batch Streaming Archive Cost Management Disaster Recovery Supplemental Capacity
- 50. Other Products from Mithi Recent awards and Recognitions Core Partnerships Mithi is a Flexible, Stable, Technically sound Cloud Partner
- 51. • Vaultastic storage grows at 3GB/second • 500K business users globally trust Mithi • 2 million+ mails daily • Warranties on Spam, Virus, False +ves, Mail Latencies • Zero Ransomware or Malware reports from our customers Preferred by Leading Businesses
- 52. You Ask We Answer
- 53. For more info Visit https://www.vaultastic.com Drop in your Queries @ Sales@vaultastic.com Get in touch Thank you !
Editor's Notes
- This is part of our monthly joint featured webinar series which we hold with our customers. The idea being to share with the audience, how our customers are using or benefiting from using our solutions. What is their story and what are their plans in the future, as far as leveraging technology is concerned. In this webinar, we will cover the background on what exactly is archiving to the cloud, how does it work, the nuts and bolts and how Vaultastic which is a true SaaS can help you achieve this email archiving requirement. We will also cover the critical part of the this webinar which is ediscovery. We will handover the system to Mr. Suresh, who will discuss how Karaikal port has benefited from using Vaultastic, then we will hand it over to Krishnan from Amazon who will talk about - How AWS has made their infrastructure elastic and scalable. Email archiving is simply defined as keeping a read-only copy of every mail sent and received by users in an email vault. IDC has suggested in a study that more than 60% of business critical information is stored exclusively in email. This indicates that employees and stakeholders are sending out a lot of designs, proposals, ideas, thoughts, approvals, which constitutes business critical information exclusively in email. From our own study of our archives, we have discovered that the average annual growth in users archive account is about 4 GB, which is quite a bit. Radicati has suggested that by the end of 2019, a business user will send 126 messages, send and receive 126 messages per day. So this data means that a 200 user company will accumulate more than one TB of data in a year and this will keep growing year after year. This is massive amount of data. Especially if you consider that the regulations require us to store all this information in case we ever need it in the future. It is a digital economy now. Everything is moving digitally. There is hardly anything done on paper. So it is a digital economy, data is even more valuable with everything happening on Email and on a digital platform, so we need to figure out a way to keep business email safe and on the cloud, E-documents are scattered across locations including email servers, PST files on local desktops, laptops, mobile devices, backup devices and other removable media. An email archiving solution, ensures that all these email are collected and stored centrally, much before they are delivered to the user. A central access to all the information reduces internal inefficiencies of finding information across all these locations and dealing with deleted or lost emails. Besides recovering lost information, having all this email data at a single spot, allows you to do a host of high leverage analytics on the data to gain business insights, identify patterns, and learn how to optimize the business. For most businesses today, since a lot of data is digital and stored electronically, it's becoming very very critical to manage risk and ensure compliance. So we need to figure out a safe place to store the data. Not just store it but it has to be safe & tamper proof and you should be able to find information in that easily, because the number suggests that there will be an astounding growth in the data almost on a minutely basis. The digital systems have been in use earlier, they are just growing now. But the older methods were things like keeping backups, keeping copies of backups, having processes to confirm that the backups are okay. Managing quota on the users so that they don't over use your storage, rotating backups in and then performing local searches in case there is a request by any compliance officer, and then of course having a team of people to help the users and the compliance people as and when required. Is there a way to simplify this. So we looked at automation, we are looking at guaranteed durability, so that we don't care about backups. We are looking at elastic storage so we don't care about provisioning discs and storage. We're talking about eDiscovery so that searches become easy and childlike and we are talking about do it yourself interfaces so that there is no IT helpdesk required at all. So let's see how all this can be achieved. If you look at business continuity, now there are lot of systems out there which are in-prem or they are using single hosted servers and they haven't really considered disaster recovery or any form of business continuity procedure, so they may be just hoping that there will be no problem. What we feel is that at least if you maintain the data safely and securely and that it is available, it is more than enough to maintain business continuity. We feel that if you need to migrate a system, especially a mail system from one to the other or you need to look at upgrades and down times during those upgrades, we need to understand that migrating large volumes of data is slow, very slow at times and it can be pretty much vendor dependent. So is there a way out to mitigate this risk so to say of having very slow Migration of large data. So what we feel is that if you have a third system which is outside your current primary platform and if all your data is stored there then even if you shift to a primary platform your data doesn't move really. We found that if you are able to reduce the storage on the primary mail platform no matter which it is, whether it is Exchange, Office 365, Google GSuite for any Linux platform also, if you are able to reduce the primary mail store size, which is typically done today by applying a quota on the users. So users are given a limit and they are told to manage their mails within those limits, and they frequently have to delete mail to make that space to maintain their mail in that space. So is there a way in which archiving of an email, introducing an archiving platform can improve this method and what it does is it allows you to store mail in a hierarchical way that is you store the most frequently used mail on the primary platform and you shift the infrequently used mail to the archived platform. So you have your entire mailbox but it is split across two platforms. So you frequently you use MS Outlook, Thunderbird or a Web Client, or a mobile client to work with your last 3 to 6 months worth of mail and whenever you need to access the in frequently available mail, you could log into your cloud platform. So using an archive system can help you achieve this hierarchical storage architecture. There is a user on one side who is using the primary mail setup to send and receive mail normally as he would do. Primary email setup has been configured to journal a copy of every mail sent and received to the Archival Store on the cloud, which the user can be given access to. So the user has got two systems to use. One is the primary mail system using a desktop email client, or a mobile email client and to access the historical mail, the user can get on to the archived platform. At the other end is the administrator or the compliance officer or the business owner who can access the same archival store for complex searches, analysis, pick out information from the mails across all the users. So the searches are actually like umbrella search. So this is technically how archival works. No matter what system you are using, whether you are using an in-premise mail system or whether you are using another cloud system or a hosted system, it is best that you keep a copy of the data on a separate operational infrastructure. Benefits are many. In case of a disaster, in case of migration, in case of, for performance reasons, for the sake of having a physically separate copy which is a best practice for backups, we propose that you store all your data on a separate operational infrastructure as a practice and cloud. Cloud by design is a very robust high performance and scalable platform. It is actually a boon in today's times. It gives you infrastructure as a service, you can actually program that like you would program code, so we've done that, to use and leverage the cloud platform to provide you a robust and high performance platform / application. The storage on the cloud is guaranteed to give you 11 9s of durability. Once you store data there, you can be assure that it is there for life and you don't have to take a backup of it because that's taken care of by Amazon. There is no infrastructure at your end which means no maintenance, no management, no team, no manpower, you are free. So you can actually shut down your office, move from one location to another, you can actually be operating from a mobile or a home office, your data is still safe. Vaultastic is a true SaaS, which means that we have designed it to be a software as a service, so you have to simply consume it. We do all the heavy lifting of maintaining the application, upgrading it, providing you reliability guarantees, providing you a SLA, providing you a self service portal and giving you the option to pay as you go.
- The entire platform is secure, if you look at the Amazon platform itself there is a shared security model. The infrastructure is guaranteed security, and it is looked at from third party, for certifications, there are millions of customers, they provide us an SLA through which we provide you an SLA. The storages are encrypted. So we're pretty much assured that the platform is secure and strong. As far as the application is concerned, we have ensured that the data once it goes in, it uses the S3 environment of Amazon to secure the data, but at an app layer we have ensured that the archives are tamper proof and they are read only. They are all encrypted for each customer. The transmission of the data is encrypted, the administration is role based, we have audit trails to make sure that you know who logged in when and what operations were done and there are several more features like you could even define policies and who can access which part of the vault and who cannot access the vault and who can search across which users. So there are many such methods by which we have made sure that security wise you are safe.
- Another benefit of using Vaultastic is we do in line email archiving which means that the archive happens before delivery because after delivery there are no guarantees. Mail could be deleted, accidentally or indirectly, the client could be corrupted, anything can happen.
- We work across the gamut of email systems out there with the most popular to the least popular and we pretty much confident that even if a new system comes up, we can develop a connector for those. So we have customers across all these environments who use our platform to store their data. In our plans, we have provided unlimited storage. So you don't worry about the storage, you just keep dumping data and you leave the rest to us. Back to back we use the infinite storage capability of AWS and at the app layer, we have ensured that you don't have to worry about storage ever. Vaultastic is a platform where we have designed it for easy data in and easy data out. So while a lot of systems are very comfortable taking data in, it’s extremely challenging when you need to pull it out, especially for a platform like archival where the data grows. A 200 user company will grow to 1 TB in a year and over 7 to 10 years it will easily scale-up beyond 15 - 20 TB. Try downloading that over the Internet or a Broadband, it will not happen. So there has to be a way in which the customer has the comfort that in case they require, the data belongs to them and they can export it and take it away whenever they feel like, in an easy way. So we worked out solutions for this, which goes right up to using the AWS Snowball to export up to 80 Terabytes of data, physically. So we have taken a lot of effort here, to make the life of the customer easy.
- You can mix plans as a customer. This allows you to pay only for what you use. If you have a 100 user company, 10 users may be the right candidates for lifetime retention because they might be the top management and their mails are valuable for life. Maybe 20-30 users, who do billing and invoicing and dealing with the banks, could possibly be on the next level plan which is a Tracer Plan for 7 years, and the remaining could be on a Continuity Plan which is for a year, so at least there is a backup of their email in case they lose some email. So this is about optimising costs. eDiscovery is actually a powerful index search across the archive mailboxes. So you can look at it like an umbrella or a blind search. So you as a compliance officer or a business owner or an administrator, have the means to fire a search which spans multiple users. And since the data is indexed, you can find any information no matter how old, in a matter of few seconds. Once you do that, you could leverage all that accumulated data to drive some decisions, gain some insight. Hand it over to a compliance officer or whatever you may feel. So e-discovery has to be looked at as a tool to make some meaning out of all that accumulated data. Let’s take an example. Show me all mails sent by Rohit to external domains and which contain a PDF attachment. So this allows me to scan all outbound mails by Rohit which contain PDF attachments. Then we could look at all the mails sent in a month to a particular domain or to anywhere. Show me all communication between Mary and Acmecorp for the last 7 years. Such queries can help you drill or investigate on the use of a particular user or the use of a particular user and a vendor or a customer of yours. You could also look at stuff like show me all the mail where an attachment contains the word ‘contract’ which can show up all the work done on any kind of contract within the company. some of the real eDiscovery use cases which we came across when we spoke to our customers. Let’s look at the first one, which we spoke about in the last webinar and which Anil from Eureka Forbes spoke about how they are planning or how they are using ediscovery. So what they do is, they have a customer support team which continuously talks to customer on email and they need to monitor quality on this. One way is of course to listen to the voice recordings. You may have heard this many a times that whenever you call a call centre, the first thing they will tell you that the call me be recorded for quality and training purposes. Yes that’s a good way but it's a very time consuming way. So what Eureka Forbes did was they actually came up with, they hired an agency which is come up with tools to automatically scan the communication of the customer support team and figure out quality gaps or training requirements you could say. That's a real use case. All the data was always there but they didn't know what to do with it. So this way they are able to improve one of the processes in the business and you know, improve the output to the customer. One of our engagements from out of India, we're talking about developing a system which can do Automated Breach Discovery which is run a eDiscovery queries at scheduled times, predefined eDiscovery queries at scheduled times to push out alerts, saying that so and so mail violates a policy in the company. So you don't have to sit and watch it but a system can give you that alert. So this is again real cases. Another common use we found across a few customers was that they are analysing customer support emails to figure out what are the common issues customers are facing. They could ask the customer support team, but they would probably remember the last few events only. So this is another very good use of leveraging all the information. Sales manager could probably look at all the proposal sent out to prospects. This is something we do in our company and other SMB customers are also doing. Recently there was a lot of mail discussion around GST and in our company as well. So if I want to figure out, put it all together in a common document and say ok this is how we will leverage GST or use GST or be compliant to GST in our company, then can I find out all that communication across my user group in one place. Yes I can, with eDiscovery I can. So these are some of the use cases which kind of improve productivity and they go beyond that legal aspect of storing email and looking at it just to deal with compliance queries. I am sure there are more use cases and I'm sure you guys can come up with some more so the question to ask yourself always is that here is my accumulated email and is growing daily what can I do with it? is there something I can figure out by queries which will give me some more insights into my business operations and figure out ways to improve it. This is something which is an ongoing thing, maybe in the next webinar, we might share some more eDiscovery use cases as a we speak to more customers.
- Good afternoon everyone. Thanks Sunil for introducing me and inviting me to speak about our experience with Vaultastic and specifically how it has brought peace of mind to my organization.
- Karaikal Port Private Limited (KPPL), is a private port, located near the town of Karaikal in the Union Territory of Pondicherry and was commissioned in April 2009. Since operations, the port has handled diverse cargo such as Coal, Sugar, Cement, Fertilizers, Project cargo, Agro commodities, Liquid cargo and Containers. Karaikal port is a congestion free port which enables efficient transportation of goods. This is attained through, the advanced cargo handling equipment, sufficient and damage-free warehousing facilities, faster turnaround of vessels and smooth evacuation of cargo with well evolved competitive logistics support. Known for its speed of clearance, efficiencies of scale and a diverse cargo mix, a notable achievement has been the port's outstanding record in discharge rate and turnaround timelines. A host of support services such as logistics has elevated the port as the efficient port, unleashing the economic potential of central Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry. Karaikal port has recorded a growth of 697% from FY-10 to FY-17 fulfilling the dreams of the industry at most economical cost. The port is well equipped in terms of modern infrastructure in water facing and on shore facilities. The port is set to fulfil the new opportunities in LNG, Containers and plethora of coastal cargo movement.
- Let me start by giving you an introduction of the mailing setup at Karikal Port. Currently all our employees consume Mithi’s cloud email service, SkyConnect. We do not have any infrastructure in premise. Most of our users access their mailbox using MS Outlook, while the rest access through Baya, Mithi’s web client and mobile devices. For a majority of the users, mails are downloaded and retained on their PCs in MS Outlook as PSTs. Apart from these desktop users, a lot of our critical users are on the field and often need to access or refer back to old emails from various devices such as laptops, tablets and mobiles. Accessing mails through portable devices, puts the organization at a great risk of leakage or loss of information, which can be damaging and difficult to recover from. In addition, having large volumes of mail, in PST files, on individual PCs/laptops adds to the risk since its quite challenging and expensive to design a backup system to capture information from each end point. Now if a user needs to locate any historical mail, he is faced with the daunting task of looking through all the PST files and faces the chance of not finding the specific mail, if it was accidentally deleted earlier. And the biggest challenge of them all is the organizational need to look through the email boxes of all users for knowledge, information, patterns, intelligence, on tap. In the current setup, it is nearly impossible to achieve this without a major effort of collating PST files and searching through them all.
- The shipping industry is fast paced and has international exposure. There is a lot of communication that takes place, mainly through email. The breakup of this communication at Karaikal is roughly 60% internal and 40% external. For statutory requirements, all this email communication needs to be retained between 4-8 years. These archived mails can often prove to be a valuable repository as evidence to go forward, in case of litigation. As we are dealing with numerous vessels on a daily basis, there is a lot of cross-communication that takes place between various parties such as ship handlers, logistics support teams, and shipping agencies etc. Vessels with scheduled arrival and departure calls, require all documentation handled safely and within the stay of the Vessel at the port. Any emergency that may arise needs to be taken care of as quickly as possible. Our critical users often need to refer back to old mails to solve emergencies or prepare documentation based on email sent before the arrival of a vessel. Thus, there is a requirement for a safe and reliable back up solution, where knowledge and information can be accessed at any time and from any place.
- Using Vaultastic has greatly simplified the challenges that we often face in our industry. The email backups are automatic and happen directly from the primary mail platform, SkyConnect, without any infrastructure or intervention from our teams. Now our critical users are no longer required to store mails on their individual machines as they are assured that each mail will be available at all times on the Vaultastic cloud. Users with access to their vaults on the cloud, can quickly and easily refer to old emails and restore them when necessary. This ability to refer to old emails in a snap has provided a major boost in productivity. The unlimited storage on all plans has simplified provisioning with no need to keep worrying about storage filling up. With no infrastructure at our end, we are freed from the task of maintaining and managing any equipment at our end for such a critical piece of technology in our business The compliance officer or managers can now use ediscovery to search across all the communication of all users instantly.
- This has really helped increase productivity as the different mail boxes are available on one console. Ediscovery, using complex search patterns, even within attachments, has allowed us to uncover hidden insights and trapped knowledge which has helped us refine our operations. Vaultatic has greatly improved the productivity of our Organisation. We have gained peace of mind, knowing that all our mail is safely stored in a central location on the cloud. And we have been able to leverage this information using ediscovery. I would recommend Vaultastic to any organisation wanting to secure their mail, quickly and easily locate and retrieve required mails with ediscovery and use this knowledge repository to increase organizational learning. With this I come to the end of my presentation. I thank you all for taking the time out for this webinar and wish you the best.
- Thank you Sunil and thank you everyone for giving me this opportunity to talk to you for a few minutes. Mithi Software is one of our trusted partners as part of the Amazon Partner Ecosystem, what we also refer to as the AWS Partner network and I have been asked to talk a little bit about, or give you a little information about as to why if you choose to build solutions that take advantage of the AWS infrastructure or the AWS services, you can take advantage of the scale, the elasticity, the reliability, the availability and the most important aspect, the durability when it comes to storage, which is what Mithi has chosen to do. So essentially, Mithi can focus on solving the key business problems for its customers such as the Karaikal Port trust. It can leave the heavy lifting related to ensuring these qualities of their service, it can leave that to the Amazon Services team. We try to make sure that we are able to deliver these for a large number of customers on the platform.
- Before we come to the elasticity, I’ll talk a little bit about the storage, which is the key service that the Vaultastic product leverages. We have a portfolio of storage services, that in turn, when you look to take advantage of it, it is not just the platforms and solutions, we do have ways that you can actually do infrastructure migration. Sunil has mentioned that briefly, in terms of, for example, using snowball to ship large amounts of data, physically from one of your existing locations into the AWS infrastructure. We also have a storage ecosystem, so this includes, not just the AWS services, but our partners as well as ISV products, so for example, if you are using let’s say a backup product from an ISV such as Veritas or a NetApp and so on. These products also in turn are integrated, so that they can use the Amazon Storage Services as the storage destination for whatever workloads that they are fulfilling. Similarly, you can have hybrid cloud storage, where you have some storage in premises that are outside of AWS and then other parts of the storage itself extending into AWS.
- When you look at the storage platform and solutions, these are all of the offerings that we have. I am not going to spend a lot of time on these, because each of these services in turn is a scalable and capable service. Some of these services are versatile in nature, some of these services are more focused on solving a particular type of problem such as, for example, if you take the Amazon EFS service, which is called the Elastic File System. The EFS service actually provides a managed shared file system, so you may be familiar with using NFS for shared file systems, that are mounted with multiple compute instances. EFS provides the equivalent shared file system that you can use with NFS mounts, whereas you have already heard of S3. S3 is an object storage, you can put any amount of objects into S3, you can get these objects, put these objects etc, using API operations. Glacier is used for archival. So as data, for cold data or data that you need to retain for a longer duration of time, but you may not access frequently, you can use Glacier.
- I want to talk a little bit about why S3 is able to offer an extremely high durability where we proudly claim this figure, where we talk about 11 9’s of durability. Now if you think a little bit about it, the reason why we are able to deliver this durability, is because the S3 service is engineered in such a way that we can actually claim that we will never lose an object once you put it in S3. For example, whenever you put an object in S3, we will only successfully acknowledge that we have received the object, once multiple copies of this object have been stored in separate facilities. So these could be different availability zones, and multiple data centers within the region. In turn, what this allows us to do is, the S3 service itself as you may be aware is more than a decade in operation at the moment, so within the service and within the infrastructure, we are constantly monitoring the service, we are constantly upgrading and dealing with our own refreshed cycles, and the reason why we are able to keep the service up and running is because we will have our own self healing mechanisms. So for example, if some part of our infrastructure experiences any particular failure, which can be a common occurrence, when you are operating large amounts of infrastructure, the self healing capability means that we will continue to, we will restore good copies of data from the multiple copies that we have and we will continue to retain these copies, a number of such copies, so that we are able survive any local instances of failure. So this is a little bit of an insight, in to why is it that the service is designed in such a way that we can offer you this very high durability.
- Just a little bit more information around the extent to which customers are using S3. We have customers that are storing billions of objects. It is a very durable and reliable platform and because all operations are API operations, the S3 service automatically scales. So this is one aspect of the elasticity that I will come to. When you are storing data in S3 or retrieving data in S3, in turn these translate into API operations, to a service end point, and therefore in addition, to just maintaining the data in a secure and safe manner, we also operate all of the infrastructure which responds to these API calls, retrieves the data or stores the data and satisfies the customers requirements for use of the data. Similarly we have API operations for easy and flexible data transfer. We are independently audited, by third party auditors on a routine and recurring basis to ensure that we have secured all of this infrastructure, we have secured the services and as part of the service itself, we give a number of security controls that customers can themselves use, so that they can decide whether the objects that they store in S3, who is it that can store these objects, who can retrieve these objects, read these objects and so on, including capabilities for server side encryption. Also recently, we have launched services such as Alexa, I am sorry, Athena, so we call it Amazon Athena. This is a service where you can have your data in S3 and you need not necessarily load it into a database or a big data cluster in order to run SQL queries on it. So these are some of the ways in which we are bringing the ability for customers to derive value from their data that they are putting into S3.
- There are essentially two or three different aspects when it comes to elasticity. Firstly, when you think about elasticity, essentially you need the flexibility, so that whatever it is that you are operating, any set of resources that you are operating, these could be storage, it could be compute, it could be networking, it could be databases, it could be any kind of advanced or high level services, the basic characteristic is that you want the freedom with little or no lead time to scale up and scale down as and when you need it. And there should not be any penalties to this, that is you need not have to plan necessarily before hand to deal. If you can plan and if you can anticipate the changes in capacity, that is also good, but if it happens in an unplanned fashion also, or rather you need not be forced to plan for changes in capacity. And one of the key reasons why the AWS platform and services are elastic, is because all operations that you perform, so when you want to store more data, you want to run more virtual machines, you want to scale out networking etc. All of these are simply API operations, that means you can perform these in software, you can perform these using a number of, either the console or utilities, or sdk’s and so on. And all these operations they will complete in seconds or even minutes. So for example if you are starting up new instances, these are online within minutes. Similarly, when you are starting up databases, these will be available within minutes. Similarly, if you are re-configuring them, if you are resizing them, if you believe in vertical scaling, if you made a choice to run an application on a certain instance type and then you discover that it probably does not have enough memory or enough CPU capacity, you can then resize it, again, using API operations, in just minutes. So there is absolutely no possibility or no need for any human intervention, or any processes which can slow down the usual requirements around scaling up or scaling down. Secondly, like I said, there are no penalties, that means there is no upfront provisioning required and there are no minimums, or commitments when you use these services and lastly we are continuously adding capacity, every single day. There are teams at AWS who are dedicated to simply continuously adding capacity and also refreshing the underlying platform, in terms of the actual hardware, the software, the configuration and all of the operational processes around delivering these to our customers.
- I want to give you some examples around this elasticity. So for example, if you just take compute, the Vaultastic product itself will operate using certain virtual machines on the EC2 service. Now the EC2 service itself, now you can provision any number of EC2 instances. You can see here that I am talking about certain limits. So these limits are nothing but simple mechanisms for protection. Because all these operations are API operations and these are operations that can also be called from software, it might happen that, due to lets say, a bug, or maybe due to some accident or human error, we don’t want that customers might end up accidentally spinning up large number of EC2 instances or VM’s or let’s say you wanted to start maybe 9 instances, but due to, you know a typo, you ended up creating 99 instances or 900 instances. So what we have is on every AWS account for each of the services, we have something called limits. So these limits will give you some small number that you can routinely provision and then what you do is, when you are aware that you requirements exceed these numbers, you simply communicate a change request before hand, which lets us know that you need to provision more capacity. So this is a simple mechanism for protection for not just your own account but as well as other customers that are using the platform. Similarly, you can take out what we call a reservation or and RI. With this you can actually ensure that whenever you require any capacity, that capacity will be available to you. This is not necessary, you don’t need to do this, but what happens is that, this gives you a lower price over a longer term. We also have a lot of spare capacity which we make available through a market which is called the market for spot instances, where you can bid for capacity and get it at much lower prices. So in this way you can take advantage of our spare capacity. We also have features like auto scaling groups and elastic load balancing, I will come to that in a bit.
- The elastic load balancing service as the name says it is elastic in nature, so unlike conventional load balancing where you must manage the infrastructure that is used for load balancing itself. The elastic load balancing service is designed to automatically grow and shrink to make sure that any amount of load can be sent to your back end applications that are serving the traffic. Similarly, your back-end applications themselves can be part of what is called an auto scaling group. The auto scaling group is a mechanism where the size of your fleet can grow or shrink on demand, based on the load that is currently hitting your application. Auto Scaling works as a triad of services working in sync. Elastic Load Balancing and EC2 instances feed metrics to Amazon CloudWatch. Auto Scaling defines a group with launch configurations and Auto Scaling policies. Amazon CloudWatch alarms execute Auto Scaling policies to affect the size of your fleet. All of these services work well individually, but together they become more powerful and increase the control and flexibility our customers demand.
- The slide shows the basic lifecycle of instances within an Auto Scaling group. The Scaling group has a desired capacity of three instances. A CloudWatch alarm triggers scaling events, and policies scale the group at specific dates and times. The scaling policy launches an instance and attaches it to the Auto Scaling group. A health check fails and triggers an alarm similar to scaling out. The instance is terminated. The instance is detached from the Auto Scaling group. You can find the public documentation on this, but the auto scaling group works by itself to perform both scale out events and scale in events, so the scale out events can add capacity when needed. Either based on increases to lets say to traffic or scheduled events, such as you know that certain applications are busy only at certain times of the day, or certain days of the week, so you can perform scale out actions during those times, or ahead of those times and then you can do scale in actions automatically, because you don’t want to be running larger fleet. So the scale in actions will automatically retire the instances when you no longer need a large fleet of instances.
- One of the great things about cloud is that we don’t have to do things the way we’ve always done them, and AWS Lambda is a great example of that. It automatically runs your code without requiring you to provision or manage servers. You just write the code and upload it to Lambda. It then automatically scales your application by running code in response to a trigger. Your code runs in parallel and processes each trigger individually, scaling precisely with the size of the workload. You are charged for every 100ms your code executes and the number of times your code is triggered. You don't pay anything when your code isn't running. This provides an incredibly efficient development model, both in terms of cost and operations, which completely removes the complexity of managing servers.
- If you look at the storage, the elasticity in terms of the storage on AWS, unlike conventional storage, you never need to tell us or tell a service before hand, the amount of storage you need. A single object can be as large as 5 terrabytes and you can have unlimited number of objects per bucket. Also the service itself, the API’s, the S3 API’s will routinely scale, everyday, where we are handling a large volume of requests from our customers in terms of the number of operations per second.
- Amazon DynamoDB is an example of innovation inside Amazon leading to a product that all customers can take advantage of. As Amazon.com was hitting massive scale, we discovered that there wasn’t a NoSQL database on the market that could consistently provide single-digit latency at any scale, so we built one. It worked so well, that we decided to make it available to everyone. DynamoDB is a fully managed cloud NoSQL database service that supports both document and key-value data structures. You simply create a database table, set your throughput capacity, and let the service handle the rest. If your capacity needs change, simply update your requirement, and the service handles the scaling for you. It natively integrates with AWS Lambda to provide Triggers that enable you to architect efficient applications that automatically react to data changes. And, integration with our access control tools means that you can set unique credentials for every user that dictate his or her access to specific data.