Advanced Disaster Recovery for a 24/7 Shipping Leader — RTO in Minutes

GAC Greece is the country's leading provider of integrated shipping, logistics, and marine services — part of the global GAC Group established in 1956. With complete coverage of Greek ports and terminals since 1986, the company runs a complex on-premises IT infrastructure including a custom-built commercial application (on Oracle DB), ERP, File Server, Print Server, and Active Directory. Around 100 users connect daily, and operations never stop.

As a 24/7 shipping business, even a single hour of downtime was unacceptable. The company faced five compounding pressures: achieving near-zero RTO and RPO for critical applications; ensuring rapid recovery from the growing ransomware threat via point-in-time recovery; replacing ageing on-premises hardware approaching end of life; and doing all of this without the high CAPEX and OPEX of building and maintaining a traditional secondary data centre.

The existing backup approach offered no confidence of working under real disaster conditions. GAC Greece needed a solution that was thoroughly tested, always-ready, and proven — not just documented.

LCM Go Cloud, working closely with the GAC Greece IT team, designed and implemented a comprehensive DR solution on AWS. At its core, AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery Service (DRS) continuously replicates all 6 on-premises Windows VMs — with 1.8 TB of attached disks — to AWS. All data is transferred encrypted and compressed, optimising both security and transfer efficiency.

A Site-to-Site VPN establishes a secure, permanent connection between GAC's on-premises environment and its AWS VPC. A pre-configured AWS target area means that in the event of a disaster, all VMs can be launched within minutes from the staging area snapshots. DRS generates point-in-time snapshots retained for 7 days — enabling swift, reliable recovery from ransomware attacks at any recent point in time. AWS IAM enforces user permissions, groups, roles, and MFA across the entire environment.

Critically, the GAC Greece IT team runs quarterly failover and failback drills — without disrupting live production — to validate the DR site is always ready and the team is fully proficient in recovery procedures. The result: an RTO and RPO of minutes, and recovery 12× faster than any other solution evaluated during the project.