As enterprises increasingly adopt a multi-cloud strategy, key challenges stand out, including the need to protect and recover business-critical applications, virtual machines (VMs), and databases across the multi-cloud environment with greater agility, efficiency, and resiliency.
Additionally, software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications like Microsoft 365 bring their own set of challenges, as we have discussed in previous blog posts, protecting data is the responsibility of the data owners, not the cloud platform vendors.
In the new reality of multi-cloud, organizations are often running applications that are “cloud-first” as well as those that are on-premises and some in the public cloud. For these organizations, at the core of the complex and challenging cloud journey is the fundamental need for application and data protection.
Businesses across industries need a single cloud-native platform to enable scale and to help them overcome the fundamental challenges of multi-cloud journey. This is exactly why Johnson Service Group chose the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud to protect its multi-cloud environment.
Beginning with integrated cloud backup and archive for NAS
As Johnson Service Group’s 22-person strong IT team knows, the volume and density of unstructured data on NAS makes it challenging to balance the costs and requirements of backup, recovery, and long-term retention.
With an active acquisition strategy, the Group’s data storage needs became increasingly expensive and unpredictable. Plus, the IT team was worried about frequent backup failure, difficulty recovering data, and the risk of ransomware.
But, as John Parry, Group IT Infrastructure Manager, found out during a 30-day proof of concept, the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud simplifies and lowers the cost of NAS data protection with features like global source deduplication, which enabled Parry’s team to achieve a 55 percent global deduplication storage savings, making costs far more predictable.
After seeing how reliable the NAS backups were, Parry was confident to expand the company’s Druva protection to 125 VMware VMs, Oracle databases, and its Microsoft Teams data in Microsoft 365.
Extending the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud for multi-cloud data protection
The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud simplifies the protection and management of enterprise workloads, such as virtual machines, databases, and SaaS applications like Microsoft 365 and Salesforce.
Some of the benefits that Johnson Service Group has achieved leveraging Druva to protect VMs, Oracle databases, and its Microsoft Teams data include a significant reduction in overhead, as Druva does not require infrastructure, maintenance, or upgrades. The on-demand scalability and data management services have helped the Group improve business continuity, minimize downtime, and reduce time spent managing backups by 90 percent.
“We get an automatic email from Druva each morning telling us what’s been backed up; it takes 10 minutes max,” Parry said.
Druva’s ease of use facilitates 95 percent faster backups
Parry talked about the smoothness of the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud, saying “It’s all very simple to use. There’s not a great deal of setup, and it’s easy to add extra machines as you go.
“Using Druva has been nearly perfect,” Parry said, which is high praise from a self-described ‘cloud skeptic.’ Initially, he was doubtful sending data to the cloud could be quicker or more affordable than saving it to a disk onsite.
And backing up data takes 95 percent less time. “Before Druva, our backups were taking three days to complete, and even then we would have to stop them because they had gone on too long,” Parry said. “Now they always complete within hours.”
Parry was equally impressed with the support he received. “Our Druva rep was a really good introduction into the journey,” Parry said. “He was quick to respond to any question we had — no matter how small.”
What’s next?
Read the Johnson Service Group case study to learn how this UK-based expert in cleaning, maintaining, and caring for textiles is leveraging the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud to centralize management of its multi-cloud environment.