McKinsey estimates that US$10 trillion on construction-related goods and services are spent each year (13% of global GDP), and yet historically this is an industry that is stuck in what the consultant calls a glacial ‘transformation’ pace when compared to industries like manufacturing or retail.
Gammon Construction goes digital
Hong Kong-native Gammon Construction is bucking this trend. The company has made public its digital future which revolves around an integrated digital project delivery (IDPD) that will consolidate processes from design to post-construction using advanced information communications technology and other smart technologies. Central to this is a building information modelling (BIM) and digital platforms such as building information management (BIM) systems.
Huge data volumes are now generated from each construction project with a single BIM model going over 100MB, with some even reaching 1GB. Managing data growth at this scale requires a more structured approach to protect critical information assets.
Updating its data protection strategy
Previously the company backed up its data on to tape archives. This meant restore processes can take at least five days. As part of its modernisation effort, the Gammon upgraded to the Veeam Availability Suite for backup and recovery raising IT efficiency levels and improving Gammon’s productivity by helping engineering teams quickly retrieve historical data.
Veeam’s file-level restores has made it easy to search for and restore a single file in the database, shortening each restore process to just a few hours.
Backing up O365
Gammon Construction also standardised on Microsoft Office 365 (O365) in the cloud for its collaboration tool.
With data growth surging, it was clear that critical data and business continuity were at risk as the native backup of O365 could not guarantee 100% data restore during disaster recovery. The previous backup tools required days or weeks for a full backup and restore, and retrieval of archived data often needed five days to process.
Having already first-hand experience with Veeam technology, the company chose to also implement a similar tactic for Office 365 and chose Veeam Backup for Office 365 to optimize data backup and recovery speeds.
According to the company, it is now able to do daily backups of over 500TB of O365 data.
With these tools in place, Gammon is now able to prevent disruptions and provide an ‘always-on’ infrastructure to the business. By improving its operational and cost efficiencies, Gammon can continue to uphold its reputation as a smart digital contractor and an industry pioneer.
