Alector Reduces Time Protecting SaaS Apps by 25% with Druva Compared to Previous Vendor

San Francisco startup Alector was founded in 2013. The company is on a mission to slow the progression of neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and hopes one day to prevent their occurrence. By unlocking the power of immunology, neuroscience, and human genetics, Alector is trailblazing immuno-neurology — a visionary therapeutic approach to stop neurodegeneration.

As is the case with many startups, the applications Alector requires to fulfill its mission are purchased, owned, and used by people in the business. When the company first started out, the business bought whatever was needed to complete its work — without IT oversight.

When Craig Guinasso joined Alector as the Sr. Director of Technology and Cybersecurity, the first thing he did was take ownership of those applications to provide sorely needed oversight. One thing he realized was the backup solution in place, Code42, wasn’t working — it didn’t always capture backups. In addition, the Code42 solution generated a huge amount of tickets for Alector’s four-person IT team, because the required agent made the processors spin out of control.

Guinasso faced more challenges when it came to the company’s data. As a seasoned cybersecurity veteran, he wanted to know what products were on Alector’s network, what they were doing, who owned them, and who to contact if there was an issue. Also, he needed to know if the data was being backed up. Due to data sprawl, knowing where data resided was a challenge.

After a proof of concept with Druva on one just one system, Guinasso noted “moving to Druva was a no-brainer.” Within hours, a full system was backed up, which this team looks at critically in terms of value in time savings.

Guinasso has been a long-time Druva user through four different companies, and many times has brought in Druva as a new vendor. Given that, Guinasso was confident in Druva’s ability to protect Alector’s data.

Guinasso says since adding Druva “our lives have gotten much better. IT is saving 25% of the four-person team’s time after installing Druva.”

Druva’s simplicity is the big win for the team at Alector. The Druva SaaS solution provides time savings as well. Guinasso commented, “We purchase it, we install it, and it just works.” IT now has one deduplicated, indexed place to go for user-created data that serves as a single pane of glass view into Alector’s backups.

Druva has impacted Alector’s operations beyond backup. The organization was delighted to learn they have a “safe space” to perform a global search and extraction of HR and nonlitigation-related data. When it comes to litigation data, now Alector has one place to find, hold, and examine the data.

According to Guinasso, “If it wasn’t for the fact we had Druva, I don’t know how we would have accomplished the volume of requests put in front of us.”