Pieta Protects Salesforce and Microsoft 365 Data, Restores 98.3% Faster With Druva

Pieta first opened its doors in Lucan County, Dublin, Ireland in 2006. Since then it has seen and helped over 100,000 people in suicidal distress or engaging in self-harm. The non- profit organization now operates 20 locations across Ireland and employs over 200 therapists and support staff.

The small IT team at Pieta is committed to doing everything possible to protect both business-critical and sensitive patient data while staying compliant with regulatory rules like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Data protection and compliance are challenging to achieve, especially with a dispersed workforce; most of the charity’s 320-plus staff members are spread out across the country, either working from home or across 15 different centers.

About 18 months ago, the charity began modernizing its IT infrastructure, which is now completely cloud-based. Pieta is leveraging software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, like Microsoft 365 and Salesforce, and initially was dependent on those applications to help restore data if needed. But the native backup capabilities of these platforms was insufficient, said Damian Menendez, IT Manager at Pieta.

“Salesforce had a very basic data recovery system that backs up once every two weeks,” Menendez said. “That’s no good to me because, if I need to restore something, that’s potentially two weeks worth of data lost. Additionally, Microsoft operates a shared responsibility model — it’s responsible for maintaining platform uptime while customers are responsible for the protection and long-term retention of Microsoft 365 data."

When Menendez learned about a charity that experienced a data breach and lost all of its data without any backups, the incident catalyzed Menendez’s search for a cloud- native data resiliency solution.

So he began looking for an easy-to-use, cloud-native solution that offered a single pane of glass to manage backups.

Menendez briefly considered Veeam, as he was already familiar with the solution. But Veeam didn’t have cloud-native capabilities at the time. He also evaluated OwnBackup, but it didn’t offer the “one stop shop” he was looking for.

So he did a Google search for “cloud backup” and found the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud. He saw a demo and was immediately impressed with Druva’s ease of use and centralized control plane.

“Within a few minutes I was convinced Druva was exactly what I was looking for,” Menendez said. “Obviously, I had to look at other solutions as well just to make sure that I was picking the right one. But it did everything I needed it to.”

Soon after, he decided to move forward and put Druva to work for Pieta. He worked with a Druva sales engineering manager to deploy the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud, and the whole process happened quickly.

“The deployment was ridiculously easy,” Menendez said. “Especially for our Microsoft 365 data, for which we are also doing compliance monitoring. It was just like click here, click there, give it a day, and you’re done.”

Druva was deployed for Pieta’s Salesforce and Microsoft 365 data in a weekend, and all backups were fully running within five days.

Now Pieta has the cloud-native solution it needed to protect data in Microsoft 365, including Exchange, Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint, and the sensitive medical data of over 100,000 patients in Salesforce.

The IT team is completely confident it can recover data 24×7 in case of accidental deletion or ransomware. And it can also recover data 98.3% faster compared to its previous methods. Before Druva, recovery was often slow due to the nature of the charity’s work.

“We would have to trawl through files while going back and forth to the requestor,” Menendez explained. “And there were frequent delays in communication because the requestor might not be on duty, might be conducting therapy, or busy answering the crisis helpline.”

That’s all changed now. “With the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud, we can recover a file in two minutes instead of two hours.”

Menendez appreciates how little he thinks about Druva. “I wanted a system that I could put in place and forget about it, and that’s Druva,” Menendez said. “Do I go into the dashboard every day? No. Do I go into the dashboard every week? No. I only check Druva if I get an alert, which is how it should be.”

Another benefit of Druva is the local Amazon Web Services (AWS) availability zones, which allows all of Pieta’s data to be backed up at the AWS data center in Dublin, facilitating its data sovereignty requirements.

“We are confident that we are meeting data sovereignty requirements, and that we are compliant with GDPR,” Menendez said. “Honestly, Druva provides total peace of mind.”