Gett Prepares for IPO with Robust Cloud Business Continuity Strategy

Gett is an app that lets people hail a taxi from their smartphone. The service is available in more than 120 cities in Israel, the UK, Russia, and the US. Founded in Israel in 2010, the organization is valued at $1.4 billion and employs around 1,000 people.

Danny Michael is global head of IT at Gett. His team is responsible for Gett’s corporate IT environment, which it has hosted using Amazon Web Services (AWS) since the company’s foundation.

This environment provides the services Gett employees use every day. Steady growth has resulted in four AWS accounts for different parts of the business and around 60 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances running workloads including SAP, Microsoft Active Directory, and business intelligence applications.

Gett also has around 20 Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances.

“Our main challenge is complexity,” says Michael. “How do we keep control of numerous accounts and resources in the cloud?”

This challenge manifests itself acutely in the company’s backup procedures. Gett used AWS Lambda functions to trigger backups of its Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS instances, but found it difficult to track which snapshots belonged to which users and which version of an instance each snapshot corresponded to. As a result, Gett was archiving terabytes of old data because it didn’t know what was safe to delete.

Michael’s team had to manually maintain tags on Amazon EC2 instances and constantly look for new instances that users might have created without informing them. This took up hours of the team’s time each week.

Restoring from backups was similarly tedious. Says Michael, “If someone wanted an old version of a file, we’d have to restore an entire instance to find it. Then, if it turned out they needed a different version, we’d have to go through the whole process again. It could take hours.”

Gett discovered AWS Partner Network (APN) Advanced Technology Partner N2WS, whose solution, N2WS Backup & Recovery, helps AWS customers back up their workloads and restore them in seconds, whether that’s a single file or an entire AWS environment. N2WS Backup & Recovery is available on the AWS Marketplace.

Now, instead of spending hours searching for the right snapshot that contains the file in question, Michael or one of his colleagues can have the file available to end users almost immediately. “N2WS was very easy to integrate with our AWS accounts,” says Michael. “It was basically plug and play.”

When Gett started with N2WS, it was backing up around 50 Amazon EC2 instances, but it now backs up its Amazon RDS volumes, too. N2WS also identifies unprotected AWS resources, so even if users fail to tag them, Michael and his colleagues can still find them. “The main benefit of N2WS is peace of mind,” says Michael.

“As head of IT, that's my main concern—making sure we’re protecting all of our critical data and restoring it quickly and easily.”

A secondary, but no less welcome, benefit for Gett is that N2WS helps the company save money. Gett uses N2WS Resource Control to stop its large Amazon EC2 instances at nights and on weekends, which saves around 50 percent—or $2,000—per instance per month.

But more significant savings have come from the fact that Gett no longer stores old snapshots unnecessarily. By tagging instances correctly and using the automation features in N2WS, Gett terminates or stops instances that it doesn’t need, and it backs up infrequently used instances less often. Says Michael, “Rather than back up dormant instances multiple times, we create a retention period using N2WS and just keep the version we need. Over a year, we save around $60,000 compared to two years ago—and that’s with the same number of instances.” 

This greater control over its backup and restore strategy has helped Gett prepare for its initial public offering (IPO) in 2020. Says Michael, “Having a business continuity plan in place is a crucial part of showcasing the business’s value to investors. Not only can we demonstrate good data protection and regulatory compliance, but we can also show we’re using resources efficiently.”