Natco Comes Home to Druva’s Advanced Security and Ransomware Recovery Capabilities

Founded in 1917, the Natco Home Group has grown into one of the country’s largest privately owned home furnishings companies. Natco Home offers a wide selection of domestically manufactured and imported home furnishings products. A staff of 800 people provide home furnishing and rugs to some of the biggest retailers in the United States — Home Depot, Wayfair, and Walmart.

The company has domestic manufacturing and fulfillment facilities located in Georgia, Rhode Island, Maine, Canada, and Mexico. Additionally, the group has global relationships with manufacturing and design partners in Europe, Asia and Africa.

Tom Ferrucci, Chief Information Officer for Natco, is responsible for IT and security operations at Natco’s headquarters, global manufacturing sites, subsidiaries, and other ventures. In the two and a half years he’s been with Natco, he has worked to modernize their data protection systems.

Ferrucci experienced a first in his career within his first month at Natco — he couldn’t restore data for a user. The Microsoft 365 environment wasn’t being backed up at all, and a user lost a significant amount of email. Ferrucci recalls, “That was the first time in my 30-plus year career that I couldn't recover something. No matter how painful it was, they were always able to recover from tape backups. This is the first time I hadn’t been able to recover something, and it was pretty disappointing.”

Natco used older technologies such as tape backups and experienced the issues common to that platform. Someone had to manage the backups, the tape storage, and maintain secure offsite locations for tape management. Of course, performing restores from tape backups is cumbersome as well. Ferrucci’s goal was to modernize the backup system and make it more agile. 

Ferrucci found other platforms that weren’t being backed up, which was concerning. He needed an agile data protection system to get that data protected, but one that wouldn’t overwhelm his busy 12-person IT and security team. He would also need to find justification for getting the budget to back up data when it hadn’t been an expense before.

It wasn’t just the backup platform that Ferrucci sought to modernize. He wanted to implement a cloud-first approach to infrastructure. As that plan matures, Ferrucci said “I want solutions in place that will take Natco into the future of IT and cloud computing.”

Ferrucci had worked with Druva at his previous company and felt confident that the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud would address current challenges. Working with its partner, CDW LLC, Natco began to reevaluate Druva and its fitness to support the team’s needs.

After considering several options, Ferrucci and team decided to bring Druva in to protect their data center workloads and SaaS applications. Druva now covers the team’s VMware, Hyper-V, Windows, and SQL Server data, as well as Microsoft 365 data for Exchange, Outlook, OneDrive for Business, and Teams.

An additional bonus is the added security they’re receiving with Druva’s Accelerated Ransomware Recovery features. When asked why they chose to add these features to their Druva investment, Ferrucci shared, “Adding Druva’s advanced security features gives us ultimate peace of mind that we can recover quickly and effectively in the event of a cyber attack.”

The IT team at Natco got the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud up and running very quickly — a huge bonus of the 100% SaaS-based approach. Ferrucci said, “I’m the CIO and do not work on day-to-day technical tasks. I was personally able to deploy Druva within a few clicks which says a great amount about its intuitiveness and user-friendliness.”

Ferrucci had to contend with the fact that he needed extra budget to protect all workloads, especially since they hadn’t been protected before. Ferrucci reports, “We were able to secure additional budget by proving successful recoveries with Druva. There were a couple of close calls that heightened their sense of the urgency in this area, which also helped sell the budget requirement.”

Ferrucci also advises his lean team to rely on Druva’s Professional Services without hesitation. His small team is good, but “They likely see things done quicker when they engage your professional services.” Ferrucci also sees time savings with Druva in regard to management and administration versus the Veeam solution they previously relied on. He said, “Although other solutions will claim that you don’t have to manage backups, if the solution isn’t born in the cloud, you’ll still need to manage backup storage which takes time.”

Although many Druva customers rely on their daily email reports to check the status of their environment, Ferrucci is a console guy, “I spend a few minutes every morning to check the dashboards and see if there's anything that should be concerning us.”

Druva has modernized Natco’s approach to data protection and security. Instead of having to worry about the intricacies of tape management, their backup data is securely stored offsite in the public cloud. This mirrors the cloud approach they have taken with their Microsoft 365 data. 

But Ferrucci is looking to shift to a cloud-first approach in many other areas, including moving back-end systems from on-premises to the cloud. Ferrucci says, “As we continue to expand our cloud footprint, we need to have solutions in place for the things we could be doing. We know that if we go with one of the big cloud players, it will be plug-and-play with Druva. That's an advantage as well.”

The team knows how important it is to have a born-in-the-cloud backup solution as they begin their planning to migrate their applications. They tried to lift and shift their previous backup solution, Veeam, and in Ferrucci’s words, “It did not work.” 

The team at Natco is happy to have a scalable solution in place to help them protect their hybrid cloud as it is developed. Ferrucci says about Druva, “The biggest benefit to me is the scalability, and that the deployment was very easy. Then we got all that wrapped up into secure offsite backups, which makes Druva a great protection and security solution.”