Businesses are increasingly moving data protection services like backup to the cloud, citing difficulties with traditional on-premises backup to keep pace with the needs of an ever-more cloud-first world. Among the most prominent factors driving this change are improved security, data recoverability, backup reliability, and reduced costs.
Medallia, a market leader providing platforms to simplify and unify voice, video, digital, IoT, social media, and other corporate-messaging tools, recently sought to make this transition for itself. Vinnie Chhabra, IT Architect at Medallia, realized the company’s tape backups were slowing down backup and recovery efforts and left the IT environment open to threats like ransomware. “We would cross our fingers every time and hope the tape backup worked,” Chhabra said. “And ‘hope’ isn’t a solid strategy.”
While it was company policy to store data on-premises, Chhabra and the IT team was able to explore alternatives to tapes, especially cloud-native data resilience solutions that would greatly simplify the access and management of Medallia’s business-critical backups, as well as enhance its ransomware protection and recovery strategy.
“We knew it would be ideal and cost-effective to have a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based data resilience solution where we wouldn’t have to manage infrastructure,” Chhabra said. “We wanted something up and running so we could do more important things than spending several hours a day on backups.”
Medallia Fortifies its Hybrid Environment with Druva — for Ransomware Recovery and Increased Efficiency
Medallia needed to protect business-critical data on 150 VMware virtual machines (VMs), including dozens of Linux-based servers running applications like Jira, Confluence, and GitHub Enterprise, and in AWS EC2. In addition, the team needed to boost its security for databases including Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
The security and ransomware protection of both key backup data and the greater hybrid environment were top concerns for both IT and security. The team briefly considered Veeam, but quickly ruled it out, opting to search instead for a truly 100% cloud-native solution. Medallia had been using Druva to secure its endpoints since 2014 and conducted a proof of concept (POC) with the Druva team for extending the platform to cover its hybrid workloads.
After meeting with a Druva engineer, Medallia’s information security team quickly understood the multiple layers of security provided by Druva including the ability to ensure that no unauthorized users could access company data once it was backed up in the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud. This was the cyber resilience Medallia was looking for.
Following the integration of Druva, Chhabra and team can rest assured all data across Medallia’s environment are secure and recoverable 24/7 as well as resistant to threats. “Druva is a big part of our disaster recovery (DR) strategy now,” Chhabra said. “We’re based in California and we get small earthquakes a lot. But even if a huge disaster happens, with Druva, we know we can recover data quickly.”
“We have a few applications that, if they went down for an hour, we’d have 500 engineers just waiting for them to come back online,” Chhabra said. “That was a huge stress and pressure before. Now with Druva, it’s fast and simple to get everything back up and running.” Druva offers fast, efficient, seamless recovery, which has had a big effect on IT workforce productivity. Plus, the team has more time to invest in other important areas. Chhabra only checks on Druva every few weeks because he gets automatic updates sent straight to his email.
What’s Next?
Post deployment, the Medallia IT team has seen a 4.4X global deduplication storage savings; in addition, simple, secure, and air-gapped EC2 backups further help the team reduce total costs by eliminating unnecessary snapshot copies. “When you find something that just works, you make sure it’s working as hard as it can for you,” Chhabra said. “Druva definitely makes things a lot faster and easier.”
Read the case study to learn more about how the team leverages Druva to keep its 150 VMs, as well as endpoints, EC2 data, and SQL workloads ransomware resistant and secured in the industry-leading Druva Data Resiliency Cloud.
