Founded in 1923, American College of Radiology is a program that offers accreditation programs in CT, MRI, breast MRI, nuclear medicine, and PET. American College of Radiology is located in Virginia.
25%
Reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) with Druva Data Security Cloud
150TB
Of Amazon EC2 data is now secured with air-gapped, immutable backups
99.5%
Of applications migrated from on-prem to AWS in just one year
About American College of Radiology
The Challenge
For years, ACR relied on traditional on-prem backup solutions like Veritas, Commvault, and Cohesity to safeguard its data centers. While Cohesity initially served their on-prem needs effectively, ACR embarked on a significant initiative to migrate critical applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and EC2 workloads. This transition, however, exposed a major limitation: their existing on-prem solutions struggled to adequately back up cloud resources.
Ben Chen, IT Manager at ACR, and his team realized it was "really hard to set up some kind of connection" to back up cloud instances and transfer the data back to their on-prem infrastructure. This cumbersome process, he noted, "made no sense" for a modern, air-gapped data protection strategy. "Having to dispatch engineers on-site for every minor glitch or troubleshooting request was a real struggle on our resources," he added. "It wasn't just an inconvenience; it added a huge headache to our operations, creating unforeseen delays and significantly inflating our total cost of ownership."
The team's inability to efficiently back up their 150 TB of Amazon EC2 data was a source of considerable frustration. Furthermore, they contended with the complexities and high costs of maintaining on-prem hardware, encompassing licensing fees, capacity management, ongoing maintenance, and even the energy expenses for cooling and powering the data center.
These challenges prompted ACR to actively seek a modern, cloud-native solution capable of managing their increasingly cloud-centric infrastructure while simultaneously reducing costs.
The Solution
ACR's search for a cloud-native solution led them to Druva. Chen first learned about Druva at AWS re:Invent, and was impressed by its capabilities after a proof-of-concept (POC) demo. The Druva Data Security Cloud proved to be the ideal choice for its ease of use and ability to protect not just AWS workloads but also their remaining on-prem servers and VMware VMs.
For ACR, one of the most significant benefits was Druva's disaster recovery feature, which played a crucial role in their VMware to AWS migration. Chen noted that this feature enabled them to be seamless "lift and shift" migration of their VMware VMs to Amazon EC2 instances. This capability saved considerable time and money by automating a process that would have otherwise required costly manual redeployment and external consulting for re-configuring legacy applications.
Druva's "pay-as-you-go" consumption-based model also stood out, eliminating the need for substantial upfront costs related to the hardware, licenses, and maintenance associated with their legacy solutions. The platform's security features, including its air-gapped and immutable backup capabilities, gave Chen the confidence that their data was protected and could not be altered or deleted.
Druva is easy to implement and manage, and it proved to be extremely helpful with lifting and shifting our workloads into AWS. Not to mention– we’ve reduced our TCO by about 25%.
The Results
By migrating to Druva, ACR revolutionized its data protection strategy, achieving significant cost savings and operational efficiencies.
Significant Cost Savings: By moving AWS backups to Druva’s cloud-native platform, ACR reduced total cost of ownership by 25% - eliminating costly on-prem hardware, storage, and maintenance, while freeing teams from managing infrastructure.
Enhanced Security: Gained unwavering confidence in recovery capabilities, leveraging Druva’s air-gapped backups and advanced data security features.
Streamlined Operations: Consolidated multiple backup solutions into a single, cloud-native platform, simplifying IT operations and reducing administrative overhead. Tasks like scheduling automated instance start/stop, previously complex with native AWS, became easier and accessible to more engineers without extensive AWS certification.
Seamless Cloud Migration: Druva played a key role in ACR's cloud journey, protecting Amazon EC2 instances during a 99.5% application migration to AWS, aiding in their lift-and-shift strategy, and supporting the planned data center shutdown.
Looking ahead, ACR plans to expand their use of Druva to protect additional workloads, including Amazon S3 buckets and Amazon RDS databases.
Overview
- ACR struggled with a legacy on-prem backup system that could not protect their growing cloud workloads.
- Druva's cloud-native platform simplified operations and enabled a seamless lift-and-shift migration from VMware to AWS.
- Druva’s pay-as-you-go model led to a 25% TCO reduction, eliminating costs associated with on-prem hardware, maintenance, and administrative overhead.
- The solution now protects 150 TB of Amazon EC2 data with air-gapped and immutable backups and will expand to include Amazon S3 buckets and RDS databases.