Cloud-first strategy and software-as-a-service (SaaS) adoption
Sembcorp Industries (Sembcorp) is a leading energy and urban development player, driven by its passion to play its part in creating a sustainable future. To accomplish this, Sembcorp required the right IT infrastructure, so its Digital and Technology (D&T) team launched a cloud-first strategy and began migrating from on-premises servers to a Microsoft Azure-based cloud solution.
As part of its cloud strategy, Sembcorp IT migrated Microsoft Exchange on-premises to Microsoft 365, but didn’t leverage third-party data protection. Instead, the D&T team relied on the default Microsoft litigation elements and email journaling.
Compelling event — executive calendar deletion and Microsoft 365 gaps
As Global Head of IT Shared Services Nigel Watson explained, the team was tasked with restoring an executive’s calendar that got deleted, and this process took several days. Nigel realized that the D&T team didn’t have an appropriate disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity planning (BCP) program in place to recover quickly for such specific events. While email journaling captures every email, it doesn’t retain folder structures or calendars, so the team essentially had to build the executive’s mailbox back from scratch.
Microsoft maintains a shared responsibility model for Microsoft 365 — they are responsible for maintaining platform uptime while their customers are responsible for the protection and long-term retention (LTR) of Microsoft 365 data. While Microsoft 365 features contain native data protection tools, this requires users to have extensive knowledge on versioning and recycle bins, along with the different default retention policies for each application.
As the Sembcorp team learned, relying on these tools places an organization’s data and projects at risk from:
- Accidental data loss caused by human error
- Deletion of data by employees before departing the organization
- Proliferation of ransomware assisted by file sharing and synchronization
- Data loss and non-compliance penalties as a result of gaps in data retention policies
Druva fills the gaps in Microsoft 365 data protection
Druva delivers comprehensive data protection for Microsoft OneDrive, Exchange Online, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams as well as endpoints, data centers, SaaS applications, and cloud-native workloads.
As the Sembcorp team learned, Druva complements Microsoft 365 by filling data protection gaps without dedicated hardware, software, or resources. Its secure SaaS platform allows Microsoft 365 data to be open and accessible to unified governance policies and ransomware protection, while allowing customers to obtain critical insights.
For its thousands of customers, Druva protects against accidental deletion, overwrites, and data corruption. It helps prevent insider attacks so businesses can detect, assess, and quickly recover from data loss. If Microsoft 365 data is attacked by ransomware, Druva’s solution is designed to quickly recover the data and return users to full productivity. And, should eDiscovery or legal hold requirements present, Druva provides comprehensive support not only for Microsoft 365, but across enterprise workloads.
Druva beats SolarWinds, Commvault Metallic, Veeam, and Acronis
Nigel and the D&T team evaluated several data protection and recovery solutions, including SolarWinds, Commvault Metallic, Veeam, Acronis, and Druva. Veeam was ruled out because it required on-premises storage and because its licensing costs and complexity were too high.
The team considered Commvault since it was already using it to back up on-premises and cloud-hosted servers, but the additional storage costs made the solution sub-optimal. These were key reasons why the team chose to extend its use of Druva, which it uses to secure more than 3,000 endpoints with Microsoft 365 data protection.
“With Druva, we pay one license fee per person and that includes everything — the platform, the individual user license, and the storage,” Nigel said.
What’s next?
Read the Sembcorp Industries case study to see how Druva allowed it to switch from a Capex to an Opex business model, which empowers a stronger corporate cloud strategy, and to restore lost data 12x faster for disaster recovery and business continuity planning requirements.