Achieving Fleet-wide Compliance and Availability with AWS Systems Manager

About CJ Darcl:
CJ Darcl believes in the core philosophy of ‘Humanising Efficiency’. It is currently one of the leading domestic multimodal logistics solutions organizations in India with market leadership in full truckload (‘FTL’) segment.
We have pan-India operations with multimodal logistics services capabilities. Our verticals include - Road/FTL, Rail/Multimodal, Air and Shipping/Coastal transportation. We offer value added services such as project logistics, warehousing and distribution (‘W&D’), and freight forwarding solutions to our customers. We lay a strong emphasis on technology adoption at every level in our endeavour to be more productive and efficient to provide best-in-class services to our diverse clientele.


Overview:

Our organization (Sapphire Technocrats Pvt Ltd) manages a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances supporting customer’s applications, web servers, and databases (non-SAP workloads). To improve security, automate maintenance tasks, and minimize downtime, we implemented AWS Systems Manager services: Maintenance Windows, Automation, and Session Manager. This helped us simplify operational workflows, enforce security best practices, and ensure consistent infrastructure management across environments.

Business Challenge:

• Manual Infrastructure Management: As a logistics major with time-sensitive digital operations (TMS, route planning APIs), CJ Darcl’s IT team faced challenges ensuring real-time availability and consistent maintenance of core backend systems. Patch delays or misconfigurations had direct impact on shipment visibility and service uptime.

• Governance and Audit Limitations: CJ Darcl needed full traceability of infrastructure access and changes to satisfy internal audit and regulatory needs. However, traditional SSH/RDP access made it difficult to enforce detailed access logs and compliance-friendly controls.

• Time-Intensive Maintenance Cycles: Infrastructure operations such as scheduled shutdowns, EBS volume backups, or rebooting services during updates required manual coordination, increasing risks of human error and extended downtime windows.

Solution:

We leveraged AWS Systems Manager to fully automate and secure the management of our EC2 infrastructure:
1. AWS Systems Manager Maintenance Windows

• Automated Patching: Configured Maintenance Windows to apply critical and security patches to Linux and Windows servers during off-peak hours.

• Scheduled Maintenance Tasks: Set up automatic disk cleanup and service health checks via Maintenance Window tasks.

• Dynamic Targeting: Used EC2 tags (e.g., Environment=Production) to automatically enroll new instances in scheduled maintenance activities.

2. AWS Systems Manager Automation

• Server Lifecycle Automation: Built custom runbooks for: o Start/stop instances based on business hours (cost savings).
. Backup EBS volumes before patching.

. Restart applications (like Apache, Tomcat, SQL Server) after updates.

• Approval Mechanisms: Introduced approval steps for sensitive production operations using Automation execution workflows.

3. AWS Systems Manager Session Manager

• Secure Access to EC2: Replaced SSH/RDP with Session Manager for all remote administration.
• Audit Trails: Configured S3 and CloudTrail logging of all session activity for compliance tracking.

• Port Forwarding: Used Session Manager for secure access to internal applications (like Admin portals and internal DB consoles) without exposing public IPs.


Benefits:

• Security Hardening: Eliminated direct server access vulnerabilities.

• Operational Consistency: Automated and standardized patching, backup, and server management tasks.

• Cost Optimization: Saved 30% on monthly compute costs by automatically stopping non production servers after hours.

• Audit Readiness: Full traceability of who accessed which server, when, and for what purpose.


Next Steps:

We are planning to extend our usage by:

• Implementing AWS Systems Manager Change Manager for full change control processes.

• Integrating Systems Manager with AWS Security Hub for real-time security posture monitoring.