Anglo-Eastern chooses Druva to protect its Microsoft 365 data from ransomware

Anglo-Eastern is a leading global provider of ship management services. It has been working with shipowners and clients for over 40 years, driven by its passion for ships. Anglo-Eastern is committed and engaged in ship management, crew management, and technical services for all types and sizes of ships.

Anglo-Eastern started its digital transformation project in early 2019, and, as part of that initiative, its IT department understood the need to embrace cloud technology. It moved its collaboration platform to Microsoft 365 for its 1,800 employees, many of whom are mobile and frequently traveling.

Anglo-Eastern runs its infrastructure on robust co-located data centers with a standardized VMware environment, and has employed strong unified backup capabilities on-premises, which created a dilemma when it came to protecting its cloud data in Microsoft 365. While IT had relied on Microsoft to recover its collaboration data in SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams, this exposed the company to data loss from accidental deletion and ransomware. Additionally, data recovery was very time consuming for the two IT administrators.

“It was evident Anglo-Eastern needed to cater for this transformation and complement its backup technology stack to increase its data protection capabilities,” said Michael Mok, Head of Infrastructure at Anglo-Eastern.

Michael’s key objectives were to increase cyber resilience, accelerate cloud adoption among employees, and reduce the overall time and cost of managing cloud files and data backups.

Michael chose to conduct proofs of concept (POCs) with both Druva and a competitor in the backup arena, the latter of which Anglo-Eastern was already using to back up its VMware virtual machines (VMs).

It was a test of two very different solutions with cloud-native Druva and the other solution being on-premises. Performance and simple management were the success criteria for the POCs, and Anglo-Eastern expected the on premise solution to be the hands-down winner since bandwidth and connectivity were not an issue in Anglo-Eastern’s infrastructure.

Surprisingly, during the POCs the team discovered that the performance advantage of the on-premises, dedicated hardware was neutralized, as it found the Microsoft API was a bottleneck. No matter how robust the infrastructure, backup performance was limited by the throughput of the API.

At this point it became clear that Druva’s cloud-native solution held the most strategic advantage. Plus, using the competitor’s solution to protect cloud backups would have required on-premises storage. It made little sense backing up cloud data to on-premises hardware, as there was no foreseeable advantage.

This is when selecting Druva’s solution became a no-brainer, according to Michael. Using Druva, which is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), meant zero infrastructure and zero maintenance, as well as a far friendlier user interface and simple administrative and management process.

Even the process of moving to Druva was simple. Thanks to its integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory, it only took one day to get all 1,800 users onto the Druva platform.

Now, Michael enjoys peace of mind that company files and data in Microsoft 365, including OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams, are protected against cyber attacks and accidental loss.

That cloud protection with Druva on AWS has led to increased confidence. “We’re definitely noticing higher levels of trust among our users in our systems and the IT team,” Michael said. The shift to cloud-based data protection is even shaping employee behavior. “More employees are willingly moving their data to OneDrive, rather than storing it on USB drives or other platforms. We’re sending a clear message as a team that we facilitate a corporate cloud strategy by making a commitment to protect files and data regardless of its location being on-premises or in the cloud.” 

Michael’s team has also reduced the time and cost of managing backups. “We know Druva is working, so we don’t have to check our backups daily, as a weekly email report is sufficient.” And when a file restoration request comes through, it is usually handled by the service desk (unlike the competitor which requires an IT administrator). That helped Michael’s team reduce the IT administrator’s time to manage data by a factor of two.

Druva was the right choice for Anglo-Eastern. In fact, Michael estimates that Druva requires only one tenth the time to manage backups when compared with the competitor’s solution. The IT team has the protection, capability, and simplicity it needs to manage Microsoft 365 data, allowing them to focus on supporting business objectives.