Businesses today are facing an unprecedented moment — today’s hybrid work environment means cloud adoptions are accelerating and employees are creating more data outside the corporate network. To make things more complex, ransomware attacks are up nearly 11x in the first half of 2021, according to Fortinet’s Global Threat Landscape Report. These attacks are now collectively costing organizations billions in lost productivity, data recovery processes, and damaged reputations, while globally data privacy laws continue to evolve.
Organizations need solutions that can support cloud-first initiatives, strengthen data resilience, streamline compliance, and lower costs. One such organization is GP Batteries International Limited, a Hong Kong-based company that develops, manufactures, and markets batteries and battery-related products. Its IT team established a cloud-first mobile initiative, and one of its first goals was to roll out Microsoft 365 for collaboration across global 30 locations.
But the IT team knew that before deploying Microsoft 365 (Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams) it needed to find a solution that aligned to its cloud-first initiative to ensure data was protected and recoverable should it experience a data loss event like a ransomware attack.
GP Batteries modernizes data protection with the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud
While GP Batteries’ IT team briefly considered Veeam, it didn’t have a cloud-native solution for Microsoft 365, and the IT team didn’t want to buy, provision, and manage hardware. So the team decided to implement the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud across the company as a third level of backup — the first two being local backup and remote physical backup. Even though Microsoft does provide a certain degree of high availability, Wilson Wong, head of global information technology for both GP Batteries and KEF Audio, said having Druva in place significantly boosted the team’s confidence during the Microsoft 365 migration.
Now, the IT team uses Druva to back up collaboration data for 1,800 global employees using Microsoft 365. Delivered as-a-service, the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud’s patented cloud architecture provides centralized management and a consolidated view of data that enterprises need to improve cyber resiliency, streamline governance, and gain business-critical data insights.
GP Batteries maintains a hybrid IT infrastructure, running some applications on-premises, like an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and a growing number of workloads, such as Shopify and Salesforce, in the cloud. Core business applications run on VMware vSphere virtual machines (VMs).
Because the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud, built on AWS, delivers cloud data protection and management across endpoints, data centers, and cloud workloads, GP Batteries extended its use case to include backing up VMware vSphere and Microsoft Windows file server data for some of its 30 sites.
Global hybrid workload data protection for its 30 sites
The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud, a resilient solution that leverages the value and efficiencies of the public cloud, allows GP batteries to reduce its operating expenses (OpEx) and accelerate its ability to protect new cloud projects. And, equally important, the solution supports storage regions around the world to make it easier to comply with complex data regulations in regions where GP operates.
With AWS data centers around the globe providing 99.99999% data availability, the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud enables compliance with regional data residency requirements as well
as workload mobility.
What’s next?
Read the GP Batteries case study to learn how the company gained centralized visibility backup data on VMs and Windows servers, and in Microsoft 365, while reducing backup consoles and the amount of time spent managing backups by 10x.