Backup & Disaster Recovery Strategy for Santa Cruz Bicycles with AWS

Sporting Goods

Global

Santa Cruz Bicycles (SCB) is a renowned manufacturer of high performance mountain bikes, known for its innovation in cycling technology and quality craftsmanship.

Founded in Santa Cruz, California, SCB combines cutting-edge design with precision engineering to create bikes that cater to professional athletes and cycling enthusiasts alike.

With a strong commitment to quality and sustainability, SCB consistently pushes the boundaries of bike performance while fostering an avid, global cycling community.

Santa Cruz Bicycles (SCB) approached Hex Networks to enhance their backup and disaster recovery (DR) capabilities. Known for their high-performance mountain bikes, SCB operates with a lean yet highly responsive IT setup. With critical product design and customer data on hand, SCB sought a robust solution to safeguard against data loss, minimize downtime, and ensure business continuity. Utilizing Hex Networks’ cloud and data management expertise, we collaborated closely with SCB to design and implement a solution

leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS), Veeam and Immutable Object Storage,

tailored to their unique needs.

Challenges Faced by Santa Cruz Bicycles:

Data Protection: Ensuring continuous protection and availability for critical design data, order records, and customer information.
Disaster Recovery: Establishing a comprehensive DR plan to minimize downtime in case of an incident and enable rapid recovery.
Scalability: Developing a solution capable of scaling with SCB’s dynamic data growth and infrastructure needs.
Cost Efficiency: Implementing a cost-effective solution without compromising data integrity or performance.
Data Immutability: Protecting against potential ransomware threats through immutable storage solutions.

Helping Businesses Optimize

This case exemplifies Hex Networks' commitment to helping businesses optimize cloud costs through a data-driven, automated, and highly tailored approach.

By focusing on efficient resource management, automated scaling, and smart cost planning, Hex Networks empowered World of Books to reduce expenses and achieve greater operational sustainability.

Solutions by Hex Networks

Hex Networks developed a comprehensive solution, leveraging AWS cloud technologies to implement comprehensive Backup and Disaster Recovery strategy, our approach includes the following key components:

Assessment & Analysis

Infrastructure Review: We conducted a comprehensive audit of SCB’s IT infrastructure, assessing existing storage, backup processes, and overall DR readiness. Identifying the best-fit AWS services and mapping out how each component would operate in the cloud.
Gap Identification: Identified potential vulnerabilities and limitations in their current backup and DR practices, such as lack of offsite backup and insufficient data immutability.
Objective Setting: Worked with SCB’s stakeholders to define clear objectives, including RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) goals, to ensure alignment with their business continuity requirements.

Solution Design

Veeam and AWS Integration: Designed a solution combining Veeam Backup & Replication with AWS cloud services, providing SCB a flexible hybrid setup for backup and DR.
Data Immutability Focus: Incorporated immutable storage solutions within AWS to safeguard backups from ransomware attacks, including leveraging AWS S3 Object Lock for added data protection.
Customizable Backup Policies: Tailored Veeam backup policies to accommodate SCB’s specific data retention needs, setting daily, weekly, and monthly backup schedules to optimize data protection.

Implementation

Veeam Configuration: Set up Veeam Backup & Replication across SCB’s on-premises and AWS, configuring backup jobs for critical applications and systems.
Replication and Recovery Setup: Enabled replication processes to ensure that SCB’s backups are ready for quick recovery in case of failure or disaster.
Access and Security Measures: Implemented secure access controls, ensuring that only authorized personnel could access or modify backup configurations, enhancing overall system security.

Integration with AWS & Storage Lifecycle Management

Tiered Storage Setup: Configured Amazon S3 as the primary storage location for active data, with automatic lifecycle policies to move data to lower-cost storage options such as S3 Infrequent Access (IA) and Amazon Glacier.
Immutable Storage Deployment: Applied S3 Object Lock on critical backups, preventing accidental or malicious deletion and ensuring data integrity.
Cost Optimization: By automating data lifecycle management, we helped SCB minimize storage costs by storing data in appropriate tiers based on usage patterns and retention requirements.

Testing & Optimization

Failover and Recovery Drills: Conducted multiple failover simulations to ensure that SCB’s DR plan was functioning effectively and meeting predefined RTOs.
Performance Tuning: Adjusted backup configurations to optimize for both performance and cost-efficiency, reducing backup times and improving resource utilization.
Data Integrity Verification: Validated that the immutable storage configuration prevented data tampering, ensuring that backups were protected against ransomware or accidental deletion.

Ongoing Support & Monitoring

After successfully implementing Backup and DR strategy, Hex Networks provided ongoing support and maintenance. This involved:

24/7 Monitoring: AWS CloudWatch was used to monitor system performance and application health in real-time. Alerts were configured to notify the operations team of any anomalies or potential issues.
Automated backups: AWS EC2s were configured for automated backups to ensure data protection.
Cost optimization: Hex Networks provided ongoing cost monitoring and optimization recommendations, leveraging tools like AWS Cost Explorer to help Santa Cruz Bicycles manage their cloud spending effectively.

Security, Privacy & Human Oversight

Privacy is enforced in the pipeline itself. Dedicated detection flags faces and personally identifiable information, and any inspection touching privacy-sensitive content is automatically routed for human review rather than auto-approved. Access to AWS resources is governed by least-privilege IAM, and all processing runs inside a controlled AWS account.

For the cases that need judgment, a review dashboard gives experts a clear queue ordered by priority. When a reviewer corrects or confirms an AI result, both the original output and the human decision are captured - building an ever-growing, labelled dataset of ground truth that feeds future evaluation and model improvement.

Results & Impact

Through partnership with Hex Networks, Santa Cruz Bicycles successfully implemented a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery solution that addresses their needs for data protection, disaster recovery, scalability, cost efficiency, and data immutability.

Key outcomes included:

Enhanced Data Protection: The integrated backup solution provided SCB with continuous data protection, supporting regular backups and swift recovery mechanisms for critical design and customer data.
Strengthened Disaster Recovery: AWS integration allowed SCB to implement a reliable DR strategy with failover capabilities, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity.
Scalability and Flexibility: The combined approach using Veeam, AWS, and tiered storage allowed SCB to scale their backup and DR infrastructure in line with growth, maintaining data integrity while meeting evolving demands.
Cost Efficiency: By employing AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing model and storage lifecycle policies, SCB achieved significant cost savings compared to traditional DR solutions. Immutable storage further protected critical backups against ransomware at minimal added cost.

Intelligent Image Analysis Pipeline

Each uploaded photograph flows through a parallel quality-and-safety stage before analysis. Amazon Rekognition scores every image for sharpness, brightness, relevance, and resolution, while dedicated detection steps flag people or personally identifiable content and surface obvious risk indicators. Low-quality or irrelevant images are caught early, so the AI spends its effort only on usable evidence.

Qualifying images are then analyzed by Amazon Bedrock, which produces a detailed property assessment - condition, identified issues, risk factors, and underwriting considerations - and assigns each individual finding a confidence score from 0 to 100. Findings that fall below a configurable threshold are suppressed, so noisy “maybes” never reach the final report.

The Decision Gate: Confidence-Based Automation

At the heart of the platform is a decision gate that evaluates every inspection against six checks:

Confidence,
Image quality,
Internal consistency,
Risk severity,
Privacy, and
insurability.

Per-finding scores are rolled up into a single inspection level confidence number and a HIGH / MEDIUM / LOW certainty band, giving reviewers and downstream systems both granular and at-a-glance signals.

When all six checks pass, the inspection is approved automatically and the carrier is notified through Amazon SNS. If any check fails, the inspection is routed to a QA queue on Amazon SQS and tagged HIGH, MEDIUM, or LOW priority based on which checks failed - so reviewers naturally pick up the most urgent cases first.

A configurable mode lets Viewspection run fully automated or send every inspection to a human, with no code change.

Automated Report Processing

Prior inspection reports rarely arrive as clean data - they are PDFs. The platform ingests these automatically, extracts their text and tables with Amazon Textract, and breaks the content into semantically meaningful chunks.

Each chunk is embedded with Amazon Titan Embeddings and indexed for retrieval, turning static documents into a searchable knowledge base for the property.

Historical findings become instantly available to inform new inspections and to detect discrepancies between what a report claimed and what the images now show.

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Unified RAG: Retrieval Across Reports and Images

A defining feature of ViewSignals is that it treats images and documents as one body of knowledge. The AI analysis of every image is converted into text, embedded with Amazon Titan Embeddings, and indexed into the same Amazon OpenSearch Serverless vector store that holds the report chunks.

Because both sources share a single property-scoped index, any retrieval for a property surfaces both image-derived and document-derived context. Every subsequent inspection of that property automatically benefits from the accumulated history of all previously processed images and reports - the system grows more informed about each property over time.

A Serverless Architecture Built for Scale & Cost

The entire platform is serverless. AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions run the processing pipeline, Amazon S3 stores media and outputs, Amazon DynamoDB holds inspection state, and Amazon API Gateway exposes the submission and review APIs. There are no servers to patch or scale; the system scales elastically with inspection volume and costs nothing when idle.

Cost is treated as a first-class concern. Every Bedrock and Titan call records its token usage, which is priced and written back onto the inspection record as a stage-by-stage cost breakdown. Viewspection gets a precise per-inspection dollar figure, making it straightforward to price the service to carriers and to confirm that model or prompt changes actually reduce cost.