Hahnair strengthens cyber resilience

Established in 1999 in Germany, Hahnair is a leader in airline distribution solutions, partnering with more than 350 airlines and serving more than 100,000 travel agencies across 190 markets. Every nine seconds, a passenger boards a plane holding a Hahnair ticket.

The Challenge

Hahnair offers its distribution services exclusively to airlines and ticketing solutions to travel agents. However, travelers benefit as well, as they can choose from more carriers, more routes, and more destinations. To provide the best possible service, Hahnair must ensure that smooth operations including data protection.

“Ransomware is a threat to any travel provider dealing with thousands of data streams. We sell a lot of tickets every year for over 350 airlines, so ensuring a smooth customer journey is vital,” explains Sven Asmus, Infrastructure Manager at Hahnair. “It’s crucial for us to have immutable backups—or backups that cannot be tampered with or encrypted by ransomware. This lets us quickly return to normal business operations and seamlessly switch to another data centre if needed. Attacks happen, and so do mistakes, so a smooth recovery is paramount.” The company also has to comply with both GDPR and aviation standards, calling for robust data protection and backup systems.

Previously, Hahnair relied on a local, in-house backup solution, requiring a lot of scattered maintenance. “Sometimes backups would take a whole day. We had to monitor a lot of things to make sure that every job was running and that backups weren’t overhauled by another process,” adds Asmus. “We really needed a system that was easy to manage. So, we started looking for a more robust, yet usable alternative.”

The Solution

Hahnair evaluated several options and ran a Proof of Concept to compare two solutions, finally opting for Cohesity. The company decided to create an immutable copy and virtual air gap of its data, isolating it from direct access on the network. Using Cohesity FortKnox, a cloud-based data isolation and recovery solution, Hahnair can follow the 3-2-1 backup rule of disaster recovery. Hanair also uses Cohesity Helios to manage all their backups with a single user interface. “We mostly back up our virtual machines (VMs) and MongoDB—our database program. We also back up documents, files, databases, and our Microsoft 365 cloud environment,” adds Asmus. All in one coherent solution.

The Results

With Cohesity, Hahnair has dramatically improved its cyber resilience and gained peace of mind. “Cohesity FortKnox provides immutability, to help ensure the data cannot be tampered with or encrypted by ransomware,” says Asmus. “If our internal infrastructure were attacked, it’d be easier and faster for us to restore everything.” FortKnox features bring higher levels of cyber resilience to Hahnair’s data, ensuring their backups are immutable and easily recoverable.

Hahnair now finds it easier to protect and manage their data. “I can manage all cloud data in a single interface. Overall, the solution doesn’t require me to think too much. It’s simple and makes it possible to respond fast even if I get an alert at 3 AM,” says Asmus.

With easier maintenance, Hahnair saves time, freeing up its staff for more important tasks. “Before Cohesity, I spent about four hours daily managing backups, but now it’s reduced to just 50 minutes a day,” adds Asmus. “This way, I can dedicate more time to helping my colleagues. And we have reduced our daily backup system administration costs by 85%.” Asmus also appreciates the swift support from Cohesity, “Our issue is resolved in a day or earlier with Cohesity support, when previously it used to take one or two weeks.”

The environment itself also runs more efficiently. “With cloud storage, we are much faster. In the old solution, backups took 26 hours. Now, it takes eight,” says Asmus. What’s more, in the previous setup, a significant amount of data was being processed and stored within the organization’s on-premises infrastructure, creating a lot of traffic through the internal network. Now, data is moved directly to the cloud, leading to nearly 70% faster data transfer and reduced network load.

With a more efficient infrastructure, the organization can recover data instantly. “For example, we had a case where we needed to perform an instant recovery of an entire machine. Currently, with the local appliance and our capacity, we feel more confident about what would happen if we had to recover 10 machines with instant recovery,” says Asmus.

Automatic failovers also minimize downtime during power outages or ransomware attacks. “If one data centre fails due to a lack of electricity or any other issue, the system will seamlessly failover to another data centre. These centres are strategically located in different regions to help ensure they can back each other up effectively,” explains Asmus. “Previously, we had a system that involved manually replicating virtual machines to another data centre. Now, it’s automatic. If a machine crashes, it can be restored almost instantly from the most recent backup at the secondary data centre.”

Reflecting on the journey, Asmus believes that Hanhair has secured its safety net: the ability to return to operations as quickly as possible. “Ransomware attacks are a major concern as some businesses never fully recover from one. With Cohesity, we have made sure that we can back up and recover safely without spending too much time or resources in the process,” says Asmus. “And most importantly, we are feeling confident about the solution, which is invaluable.”

Key Benefits

• 18 hours saved per full backup
• Daily backups reduced from 4 hours to 50 minutes
• 85% reduction in backup system administration expenses
• 70% faster data transfer and reduced network load

About Hahnair

Hahnair offers its distribution services exclusively to airlines and ticketing solutions to travel agents only. However, travelers benefit as well as they are able to choose from more carriers, more routes and more destinations. Every year millions of passengers travel between 4,000 locations using Hahnair’s HR-169 tickets.