Konkat implements disaster recovery with LCM Go Cloud on AWS

From maritime vessels to air transportation, refineries, retail chains, automotive dealerships, construction, and hospitality operations, Konkat supports nearly 30 companies across various industries with mission-critical IT services. But this diversity came with a sobering reality: A single centralized data center meant a single point of failure. “We didn’t have a DR solution,” says Taxiarhis Georgiou, IT director at Konkat. Basic on-premises backups existed, but there was little confidence that they would work during an outage. With all-day operations across widespread regions, even a short downtime could halt critical business systems worldwide.

Regulatory pressures added urgency. The NIS 2 directive now mandates DR for critical infrastructure sectors, including maritime and aviation. Meanwhile, business realities were unforgiving. “It’s not acceptable to have maintenance windows with downtimes,” says Costas Kappos, managing partner at LCM Go Cloud.

“In the global shipping industry, there are no nights or weekends,” says Georgiou. “In the first year alone, building another traditional data center 100 miles away would have cost three to five times as much as using a cloud solution.” This estimate excludes ongoing costs for staff travel, hardware replacement, and facility management and maintenance.

Konkat evaluated multiple options, running proofs of concept on both AWS and another cloud provider. The decision came down to performance and technical capability. “It was a technical reason, not a cost reason,” says Taxiarhis Georgiou. “We realized that the cloud provider that could meet our requirements is AWS, which recommended LCM Go Cloud.”

LCM Go Cloud began by conducting an optimization and licensing assessment across Konkat’s 150 virtual machines (VMs). The team then designed a hybrid DR strategy that combines pilot light and warm standby strategies. This way, the architecture keeps critical databases running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. When needed, dependent applications start within minutes and connect to these live databases. Konkat uses AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, a service that minimizes downtime and data loss with fast, reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications. To protect 28 TB of storage across 50 production servers, the company uses Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), which offers easy-to-use, high-performance block storage at nearly any scale.

The implementation goes beyond basic recovery capabilities to enhance visibility and governance by using several AWS services. These include Amazon CloudWatch to observe and optimize workloads, AWS Security Hub to prioritize critical security issues, and Amazon GuardDuty to protect AWS accounts and workloads. The solution also uses Amazon Inspector for automated and continual security assessment at scale and AWS Config to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of Konkat’s resources. The team can dive deeper into AWS cost and usage data through AWS Cost and Usage Reports. To visualize both security findings and cost data, Konkat uses Amazon Quick Sight, which delivers AI-powered business intelligence capabilities. In addition, the automated change detection prevents configuration drift between on-premises and DR environments. Throughout the 6-month implementation, knowledge transfer proved as important as technology, helping achieve operational readiness and long-term self-reliance.

Konkat now runs regular DR drills that validate what matters most: confidence. “We do drills through the DR process, and LCM Go Cloud helps by providing a safety net,” says Georgiou. “I’m sleeping better knowing that we have the DR solution that LCM Go Cloud helped us implement. If something happens, it will be there.” The recovery time objective is 30–60 minutes, the recovery point objective is seconds to 5 minutes, and the system’s automation freed resources equivalent to one full-time employee or 40 hours per week. This unlocked what had seemed impossible: maintenance windows that don’t interrupt all-day shipping operations that span the globe.

Financially, the return on investment strengthens over time. Konkat expects to reach breakeven in 4 years and make additional gains by avoiding hardware refresh cycles and reducing operational overhead. Konkat’s clients are already benefiting from lower insurance premiums for the verified DR capabilities and the simplified NIS 2 compliance audits. With 100 additional VMs ready for onboarding, the company can scale confidently. “Regarding our return on investment, I think we did the right thing,” says Georgiou. “If I needed to do it all over again, I would choose the cloud again.”