Today, Eon gives us a 15-minute recovery point we can count on across the whole estate. Tomorrow it's the data itself, queryable, and driving revenue instead of sitting idle.
—Justin Griffith, Senior Director, CloudOps, PDI Technologies
About the Customer
PDI Technologies is “Connecting Convenience” through integrated, AI-powered solutions for convenience retail and petroleum wholesale, helping businesses work smarter, faster, and more efficiently.
The Challenge
Moving to AWS raised the bar for high-frequency data protection
PDI hosts environments for enterprise customers in a single-tenant model across a large, acquisition-grown AWS estate, under strict data protection and sovereignty requirements.
A recovery commitment written into contracts
When PDI hosts a customer environment, it is expected to meet the availability and recovery commitments defined in that engagement. Because many customer environments support around-the-clock retail operations, any disruption has direct business impact beyond the IT organization. It lands on a live retail operation.
PDI was migrating from its on-premises data centers into AWS. During the move, the team put AWS Backup in place and set out to hold one hard line: a contractual recovery point of 15 minutes for its Platinum Enterprise hosting customers.
A hand-built workaround that couldn't scale
AWS Backup does not meet a 15-minute RPO natively, so as an interim step during the migration, PDI's team built their own workaround: custom Lambda code that manually triggered EBS snapshots every 15 minutes, which the team had to maintain themselves. The on-premises data stayed in place through the transition, so this was an added layer during migration, not the only line of protection.
It worked, but at scale, the numbers told a harder story. Success on those high-frequency jobs ran near 80%, which required significant operational oversight, and the team knew a hand-built process at that rate wasn't something they wanted to run under a contractual commitment long-term.
And the estate kept growing around the requirement. Close to 600 AWS accounts, roughly 350 of them dedicated to enterprise hosting, each one protected account by account. PDI started looking for a platform that could hold the 15-minute line across all of it, without the upkeep.
Why Eon
A cloud-native platform with lower cost, open data, and a desired RPO
PDI was not looking for backup coverage alone. Cost pressure opened the door, but the team wanted more capability too.
I wanted to look at options that either brought more features or were more cost-effective. In that search, I found Eon, and coincidentally, it was both of those things.
A cost advantage built into the architecture
Cloud-native deduplication and a small block size reduce data volume, so PDI pays for far less than the raw footprint of what it protects. PDI could see exactly where the savings came from, down to the block size.
Automated protection and an RPO built to spec
Eon applied backup policies automatically across all accounts, replacing the hand-built snapshot workaround the team had been maintaining. The 15-minute RPO sealed the decision: It wasn't something Eon sold off-the-shelf, but its engineers built one for PDI.
Open data, queryable without a restore
Unlike backup tools that lock data in proprietary formats, Eon keeps everything it protects in open Parquet. PDI can query it directly, pulling insight from historical business data without restoring anything first. The capability that protects the estate also gives the team a foundation to build on, and access to protected data remains governed by PDI's existing access controls and operational policies.
The Solution
One platform across nearly 600 accounts, with a 15-minute RPO
Coverage that kept pace with the migration
Policies automatically follow resources through automated data classification, so coverage kept pace as workloads moved to AWS rather than lagging behind the migration.
The account-by-account routine has been replaced, and Eon's high-frequency solution now enforces a 15-minute RPO across all Platinum Enterprise hosting accounts.
Recovery built for a single-tenant model
Each customer's data is stored in its own vault, and role-based access controls who can restore it and what they can see. That is the isolation PDI's contracts require, enforced by the architecture rather than by hand.
Upon recovery, the team can restore an AMI or the underlying EBS volumes, depending on the situation.
The Results
Reliable protection across hundreds of single-tenant accounts, managed from one platform
Throughout the transition, PDI maintained protection for customer environments while modernizing its backup and recovery architecture.
The 15-minute promise, kept reliably at scale
PDI's Platinum Enterprise customers sign up for a 15-minute recovery point, something AWS Backup can't support natively. With Eon, backup success on those jobs runs around 99.95%, up from about 80% on the AWS Backup workaround, even for databases well over a terabyte. That reliability lets PDI stand behind its 15-minute commitment to its retail and fuel customers with confidence, and hold that line without depending on a process the team has to maintain by hand.
The fact that that's working is impressive, especially with the deduplication and block-size work Eon does.
One platform across the estate, and time back for the team
Running the whole estate through a single platform, but with dedicated vaults, gave PDI a single place to confirm that every customer environment is meeting its protection and compliance targets. The day-to-day changed too: PDI's engineers can see and cover each other's work, and the effort that once went into managing protection on an account-by-account basis is being reinvested in what comes next.
With that foundation in place, the team is going further, building automated recovery pipelines on Eon's APIs so a cross-region or cross-AZ restore is ready before an incident, not assembled during one.
A vendor that ships at PDI's pace
Much of what PDI needed did not exist off the shelf when they signed. Eon built the 15-minute RPO solution for them and reworked the console for an environment with hundreds of vaults. The RPO solution went from spec to production in days, and a vault-search feature the team asked for shipped two days later.
Probably the fastest turnaround I've seen out of any software vendor I've ever worked with. And being a software vendor ourselves, we know what that reality is like.
The Future
Leveraging backup data as a business asset
With protection handled, PDI is turning to the bigger prize: the data itself. Everything Eon protects is stored in open Parquet, so the estate is both protected and queryable. Today, the team queries daily backups, and as coverage and freshness grow, far more of the estate comes within reach.
The payoff runs two ways. PDI can mine its own history for insights, and it can give the customers who depend on it richer, faster reporting.
What makes it work is where the queries run. PDI's production systems ring up sales around the clock, so analytics stay off them entirely, hitting the protected copy instead. A heavy query never slows the storefront behind it.
None of it turns into a second project. The data sits in open formats, so PDI uses whatever query engine it wants, with nothing proprietary to migrate out of later.
When a customer wants to know their top five moving products a year ago versus today, Eon gives us a way to get to that data much more effectively. As we bring in fresher data, that becomes real-time reporting they can act on.
