Shearman & Sterling Transforms Backup and DR to Increase Security and Reduce TCO

Shearman & Sterling LLP has been advising many of the world's leading corporations and financial institutions, governments and governmental organizations for more than 150 years. It has over 850 lawyers around the world speaking more than 75 languages and practicing U.S., UK, EU, Middle East and Asia law.

Shearman & Sterling’s lawyers work with clients across more than twenty branch offices in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Privacy, security, and availability of corporate data are paramount. To protect client data, the firm had an intricate backup and disaster recovery (DR) architecture for hundreds of terabytes (TBs) of data on VMware virtual machines (VMs) and NAS file shares. The firm examined its data resilience and security posture and found the following problems:

• Existing solution could not provide a real-time view of backup and data security posture and lacked seamless support for SaaS and PaaS solutions

• Data protection architecture was costly due to multiple vendors, unnecessary solution licenses, infrastructure, and people requirements

When executive management required the firm to have a cold site data center with a golden copy of its data, completely offline and air-gapped for security purposes, the team had to buy more Data Domain hardware and add Sungard to its DR scenarios. But the high cost prohibited it from backing up all tier-one applications, forcing the team to choose what data to back up and leaving other applications vulnerable.

At the same time, business leaders decided to stop investing in on-premises hardware and software, and tasked Leticia Espinosa, Shearman Supervisor of Infrastructure and Continuity and her team with devising a cloud-first strategy for data protection.

Espinosa’s team was looking to enhance their security posture and breadth of coverage while reducing the costs and complexity of data protection and DR for critical data center workloads. Though the team had already turned to the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud to protect Microsoft 365 data including OneDrive and Teams data for 2,000 users, it decided to evaluate alternative solutions for data on VMs and file shares.

Ultimately, many of the options proved to be too expensive, lacked functionality and did not fulfill the complete requirements. Additionally, they would have added complexity and put more pressure on a team that was already facing a skills gap.

“With Microsoft 365, Druva was such a success because it allowed for the migration of Exchange and the enablement of the full suite of Microsoft 365 in its entirety a lot quicker than we anticipated,” shared Espinosa. So, when technology partner SHI mentioned Druva for the mixed data center workloads, Espinosa agreed to a demo.

“Once we saw that the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud would enable scalable data protection [and DR] for ~400 TB of NAS file share data, hundreds of VMs, software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications like Microsoft 365, and endpoints, we were convinced it was the right solution,” Espinosa said. Equally important, the ransomware-resistant architecture, continuous monitoring and rapid recovery capabilities of the Druva solution increased their global security posture without taxing their teams.

The Druva ransomware-resistant architecture and simple disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) capabilities allowed the firm to consolidate two data centers (APAC and Frankfurt) and eliminate duplicate and over-provisioned resources (software, hardware, offsite services, and related maintenance), resulting in major costs savings. 

Today, the team has deployed Druva for all Microsoft 365 data and NAS file shares, and is on track to migrate all VM data, allowing it to fully replace Veeam. With accelerated ransomware recovery for business-critical data and DR-as-a-service (DRaaS), the team is prepared to recover in hours from both unexpected disasters as well as security breaches.

Thanks to its expanded use of the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud, Shearman & Sterling has been able to enhance its security posture, lower the costs and complexity of data protection and DR services, and consolidate data centers.

“Druva enabled us to decommission Data Domain in Asia, saving a couple hundred thousand dollars, and now Druva is helping us decommission our entire data center in Frankfurt, which will save us close to $600,000 more. Thanks to Druva, we are on track to reduce our TCO by 30% or more,” Espinosa added.

Additionally, Druva makes data restoration easier and faster, specifically in the isolated environment. Before, it took the team three days to restore large VMs while file shares took a full week to be recovered in the cold site. Now, the team can restore two file shares in four hours, which is 97.6% faster than before. Bringing our cyber recovery RTO closer to 3 days from the previous 14 days. On average, backups and restores with Druva take less than 20 minutes to complete, and the success rate is 100%.

The team also has assurance in its ability to scale storage for backups quickly and predictably. “If a new legal client needs us to store 50 TB of data, we adjust our needs on-demand with Druva and we’re set,” Espinosa said. “Before, we would have to order hardware and software and wait up to seven months for delivery. Druva helps us tremendously with client relations,” she added.

Using Druva also makes it easier to meet legal hold obligations. “We don't need to purchase additional licenses for legal holds in Microsoft as we did before because Druva has the capability built in.”

“With Druva, we will have visibility into VM backups 24x7, which we didn’t have with Veeam,” Espinosa said. “Druva also has out-of-the-box integration with observability platforms we use like Splunk and ServiceNow, so we don’t need custom scripts.”

Ultimately, the greatest benefit for the firm is increased confidence and protection of its brand. “Our CTO can talk about our data security posture to our executive team and the board with much greater confidence, and we have assurance our brand is protected thanks to our partnership with Druva,” Espinosa added.