Enterprise IT teams are increasingly finding that managing, backing up, and restoring their critical data across hybrid environments is no small feat. Hybrid environments are complex and often expensive, with workloads like NAS and VMs creating additional challenges. The volume and density of unstructured data on NAS make it difficult to balance backup, recovery, and retention. Protecting VMs across data centers, remote offices, and other environments escalates costs, creates security challenges, and slows innovation.
100% SaaS-based data protection works across on-premises and cloud to reduce complexity, improve search/recovery, and lower storage and archive costs by up to 50% percent for hybrid workloads. Let’s explore a real-world use case to illustrate the advantages of the cloud…
Data Protection On-Premises Adds Cost and Complexity
The Forest of Dean Trust, a family of schools in Gloucestershire, England, managed an on-premises environment of VMs and NAS with each backup needing to be maintained individually — a lengthy and painstaking process.
Additionally, the team protected a Synology NAS environment with Veeam, storing backups both locally and online using Google Workspace. But, this posed a significant barrier to data recovery, as the team needed a working Synology server on-premises in order to recover backups, according to Emily Stigant, ICT Manager. “With Synology, if we had a data corruption event, copies of that data would have been backed up to the cloud in Google Workspace,” Stigant explained. “If that happened or our Synology solution went down, we had no way to recover viable NAS data.”
Migrating from Veeam for Simplicity, Scalability, and Results
Stigant and team knew they needed to upgrade their IT environment and began looking for a 100% SaaS-based data protection platform to replace Veeam. After considering Microsoft Azure Backup and Arcserve, Forest of Dean Trust chose Druva, noting its simple user interface, ability to cut costs, and distinct lack of hardware to manage.
“I could see with Druva I wouldn’t have to worry about the hardware or anything that’s going on in Amazon Web Services (AWS),” Stigant said. “All I’d need to worry about is that I’ve got the right clients, the right data being backed-up on my servers, and those servers are communicating with the cloud.”
The team deployed Druva and had 100% of its workloads backed up and protected in the cloud within half a day. “The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud is truly set and forget it,” Stigant said. “It does everything it says on the tin.”
Proactive security emails from the Druva platform alert the IT team if something needs their attention. “The alerts give us a sense of security that we can trust Druva,” Stigant said. “I know when something’s wrong without having to manually check it all the time.”
Through a single pane of glass, Stigant and the IT team are able to manage all VM and NAS backups quickly and easily. Following deployment, they’ve found they spend 25% less time managing backups with Druva than with Veeam. In addition, they received over 25% cost savings as a result of cutting out management for hardware and resource-intensive software updates.
What’s Next?
The next steps for Stigant’s team? Moving more infrastructure into the cloud. “We plan to get rid of Synology altogether and transition over to site recovery in the cloud,” Stigant said. “So when we have the site fail-over, the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud will do our NAS backups and it’ll fail over to reserve site recovery.”
Read the full case study to learn more, and visit the customer stories page website to discover how Druva meets the data protection needs of thousands of unique, satisfied customers.
