San Francisco startup Alector seeks to innovate new methods to slow the progression of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and more. While this is no small undertaking in its own right, the startup sought to expand quickly, and made decisions to advance its research and technology development —all without a dedicated IT team.
When Craig Guinasso recently took over as Alector’s Sr. Director of Technology and Cybersecurity, he immediately began implementing changes to optimize IT and the company’s digital environment. Among these initial changes, Craig noticed the team’s backup solution, Code42, wasn’t meeting the demands of the company and plagued the IT team with tickets. Apart from challenges with the backup environment — Alector also suffered from data sprawl with critical data residing across a variety of environments, including the data center and Microsoft 365. This made it difficult to track the status and location of key workloads, their security, and more.
Transitioning from Code42 to Druva for Simplicity, Security, and Savings
Guinasso noted that Code42 would no longer meet the expanding business’s needs. A long-time proponent of Druva having used it at four different companies, he suggested the team try a proof of concept, and after a brief trial determined it was a “no brainer” to make the switch. Within a few hours, 100% of Alector’s data across all workloads was backed up and secured in the air-tight Druva Data Resiliency Cloud.
Following deployment, Alector IT has been raving about the newfound simplicity delivered by Druva. By simplifying operations and removing barriers to manage and scale data protection, Druva allows anyone, not just IT or admins, to easily manage backup and recovery across physical and virtual workloads, cloud-native, SaaS applications, and critical endpoints. The team expects they’ve reduced the time they spend on backup and recovery at least 25% vs. their previous solution with Code42.
Besides backup and recovery, the team is reaping the benefits of simple, single-look search, extraction, and litigation data. “If it wasn’t for the fact we had Druva, I don’t know how we would have accomplished the volume of requests put in front of us,” Guinasso said. Druva’s automated and accelerated eDiscovery process helps teams respond quickly and place legal holds to ensure data integrity and tamper-proof audit trails.
In addition, Alector management received new peace of mind regarding its Microsoft 365 data. Like many companies, Alector was previously reliant on Microsoft’s retention policies for the recovery of deleted data. Due to Microsoft’s shared-responsibility model, Guinasso and team would have been at the mercy of the 90-day retention period when it came to deleted data. With Druva, all data protected in the Microsoft 365 suite, including Teams and Exchange, OneDrive, and Outlook, are kept secure and recoverable 24/7. Druva’s Accelerated Ransomware Recovery Solution provides observability into the security posture of their backup environment and features that accelerate the recovery of clean data in the event of an attack, providing them the confidence that they can minimize downtime and never have to pay a ransom.
What’s Next?
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.
