Medallia Lowers Risk by Moving Data Resilience to the Cloud for VMware and AWS Workloads

Medallia is the pioneer and market leader in customer, employee, citizen, and patient experience. The company’s Medallia Experience Cloud is the experience system of record that makes all other applications both customer and employee aware. The platform captures billions of experience signals across interactions including all voice, video, digital, IoT, social media, and corporate-messaging tools. Their customers include Hilton Hotels, Mercedes Benz, Delta Airlines, and more.

Companies choose Medallia to help them become “customer-obsessed.” And Medallia employees depend on the company’s IT team to ensure everything runs smoothly behind the scenes so they can meet customer expectations.

That’s why Medallia’s IT team is always looking for ways to serve employees better. It realized the on-premises tape backups it had used for years were slowing the company down; if an employee accidentally deleted a file, it could take two days to recover the tape backup from Iron Mountain.

Plus, the tapes weren’t reliable, said Vinnie Chhabra, IT Architect at Medallia. “We would cross our fingers every time and hope the tape backup worked,” Chhabra said. “And ‘hope’ isn’t a solid strategy.”

Although it was company policy to store all data on-premises, the IT team was able to explore alternatives to tapes, including cloud-native data resilience solutions, that would make it easier to manage and access backups.

“We knew it would be ideal and cost-effective to have a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based data resilience solution where we wouldn’t have to manage infrastructure,” Chhabra said. “We wanted something up and running so we could do more important things than spending several hours a day on backups.”

So Chhabra looked for ways to reduce the cost and complexity of data resilience and to improve the speed restores.

Chhabra’s team needed to protect business-critical data on 150 VMware virtual machines (VMs), which included dozens of Linux-based servers running applications like Jira, Confluence, and GitHub Enterprise, and on AWS EC2 virtual machines.

The team also needed data protection across critical databases like Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

Medallia had been using the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud to secure 2,000 endpoints since 2014, so it made sense to consider extending protection with Druva to the data center and hybrid workloads. The team also considered Veeam but wanted a true cloud-native solution – making Druva the ideal fit.

Security and ransomware protection of both backup data and their backup platform were top concerns for both IT and security. After meeting with a Druva engineer, Medallia’s information security team quickly understood the multiple layers of security provided by Druva including the ability to ensure that no unauthorized users could access company data once it was backed up in the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud. This was the cyber resilience Medallia was looking for.

Chhabra’s team conducted a proof of concept (POC) with Druva and saw quick results. “Honestly, the integration was so smooth,” Chhabra said. “We put our credentials for VMware vCenter into Druva and five minutes later were able to see all our VMs protected by the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud.”

As a result, the company decided to extend its use of Druva from endpoints to include 150 VMware VMs, along with data in Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL, and MySQL databases. Chhabra can’t imagine life without it.

“Druva is a big part of our disaster recovery (DR) strategy now,” Chhabra said. “We’re based in California and we get small earthquakes a lot. But even if a huge disaster happens, with Druva, we know we can recover data quickly.”

Now Medallia has the data resilience it needs across business-critical applications. The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud gives Chhabra confidence that the IT team can keep things running smoothly – no matter what happens.

“We have a few applications that, if they went down for an hour, we’d have 500 engineers just waiting for them to come back online,” Chhabra said. “That was a huge stress and pressure before. Now with Druva, it’s fast and simple to get everything back up and running.”

Druva offers fast, efficient, seamless restores, which has had a big effect on IT workforce productivity. Plus, the team has more time to invest in other important areas. Chhabra only checks on Druva every few weeks because he gets automatic updates sent straight to his email.

“Saving time is great, but it’s so much more than that,” Chhabra said. “Because even when I was spending all those hours before, the backups could still fail. Now, with Druva, I have peace of mind, which is priceless.”

Price is still important, of course, and switching to the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud helped reduce Medallia’s risk and total cost of ownership (TCO), as it doesn’t have to buy and manage on-premises tape backup systems like jukeboxes. Plus, with Druva, the team has achieved a 4.4x global deduplication storage savings.

Recently, Chhabra expanded Medallia’s Druva deployment to include four critical Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances with Druva CloudRanger. Medallia IT now has simple, secure, and air-gapped EC2 backup that will help the company further reduce TCO by eliminating unnecessary snapshot copies.

“When you find something that just works, you make sure it’s working as hard as it can for you,” Chhabra said. “Druva definitely makes things a lot faster and easier.”