Hero Future Energies (HFE), a division of the Hero Group and one of India’s leading independent power producers, recently began its transition to the cloud seeking to break from tape-based backup as well as backup of Microsoft File Servers and more than 300 devices. The team recognized the importance and capabilities of the cloud and chose Druva’s 100% SaaS-based solution for its reputation on quick and easy data recovery from ransomware or loss.
However, this was just the start as HFE’s IT team soon realized its Microsoft 365 data was left unprotected. The team relied on Microsoft’s native backup capabilities, which were inconsistent, and left the team susceptible to accidental deletion and ransomware as a result of the solution’s 90-day limit on recovery.
The team began exploring its options to protect this precious workload, again emphasizing the need for this solution to be cloud-native.
Adding Druva for Microsoft 365 and reaping the benefits
Given the IT team’s previous experiences with Druva, it was among the first options considered for Microsoft 365 backup. It was critical the solution chosen could expand with the company’s storage needs — scaling up or down on-demand. While they considered other options, ultimately Druva was chosen as others had hardware and software costs plus a lack of scalability with the on-prem solutions.
As an added bonus, HFE’s IT team had experience working with Druva and noted its support team as a major benefit. Vinod Sharma, Head of IT, noted: “Druva post-sales support is fantastic. That type of supplier relationship plays such a key role for us in streamlining our IT environment. As we’ve learned, once you onboard any partner, if the services are not on par, it undermines everything else you’re trying to accomplish.”
Another major advantage setting Druva apart from competing solutions is its “only pay for what you use” billing model. With this model, Sharma and team are able to easily increase storage capacity without suffering from the excessive expenses typical when moving up a storage tier. “One of the best things about Druva is its token-based billing,” Sharma said. “We simply buy storage and consume it; it’s just that simple. With Druva, we really like that we only pay for what we need. That makes it quite easy to manage our budget while making sure we always have enough space for critical data backups.”
Cutting management time 99% with extensive storage savings
Following its rollout of Druva for Microsoft 365, Sharma noted his team has comprehensive coverage across workloads. IT is confident it can recover more than 22 terabytes (TB) of critical business data from isolated, full, forever backups in the Druva Cloud. “The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud gives us lots of confidence, but more importantly, it means we don’t have to think about backups or spend time managing infrastructure.”
Not only is it quicker — it’s 99% quicker! While the team spent up to two hours a day managing tape backups on-prem, Druva cut this task to two minutes. IT need only check in with the Druva platform — and even this is often unnecessary as Druva delivers automated alerts. “Honestly, with Druva the backups take care of themselves,” Sharma said. “My team gets alerts by email if there is an action required, and it completely takes the guesswork out of backing up data.”
What’s next?
Apart from the reduction in management time, Sharma and team have seen 2.35x storage savings as a result of Druva’s deduplication. Read the customer case study for a complete look at the Hero Future Energies story, and visit the customer page to explore how Druva empowers companies — SMB to enterprise — to seize the full value of their data.
