From On-Prem to Cloud: Armanino's Journey to Secure End-Users with Druva

Armanino LLP provides accounting and consulting services. The company offers auditing, tax advising, business consulting, and related technology services. The company is headquartered in San Ramon, California.

Armanino, a multi-location accounting firm, faced increasing difficulty managing data backups for hundreds of employees across the U.S. and beyond. Their legacy on-prem solution struggled to keep up with the growing workforce and surging data volumes that regulatory compliance requires the accounting firm to hold onto.  

"With our previous solution, we were running into some issues with scalability," explained Morries Merchant, Armanino's Senior Systems Engineer. "Getting more equipment, storage arrays, and such." It became evident that Armanino needed a more robust, scalable, and cost-effective solution.

Armanino partnered with Druva in 2010, and by 2018, they began transitioning all their backups to the cloud using Druva’s fully cloud-native, 100% SaaS backup solution. With support for multi-cloud environments, Druva is the ideal choice for businesses embracing cloud migration and looking to protect data across platforms, including AWS and Microsoft Azure. Druva harnesses the scalability and reliability of cloud infrastructure to deliver comprehensive data backup, recovery, and disaster recovery services. Armanino’s migration required meticulous planning to ensure a smooth transition of existing data and seamless implementation of the new system.

They implemented a two-year local data retention policy and gradually retired the on-prem system.

"The initial project involved migrating all users to the cloud version," Merchant explained. "We then transferred their data by using backups from that point onward." The company maintained a two-year local data retention policy, while gradually phasing out the on-premises backups.

The move to Druva’s cloud-based backups proved to be transformative for Armanino. Beginning as an on-prem customer, they successfully migrated all end-users to the cloud in just two weeks – a major time saving benefit for Merchant and team.

Reliability and Compliance

Merchant highlighted his favorite parts of the Druva solution: “What I love about Druva is the reliability, ease of use, and zero backup failures." Druva also met critical compliance requirements, including those under ISO 27001 standards, such as data encryption and immutability.

The ISO 27001 standard is crucial for organizations, as it ensures a systematic approach to managing sensitive information, protecting it from security threats, and maintaining trust with clients and stakeholders. Druva played a key role in helping meet these standards by providing robust data encryption, ensuring data immutability, and making it easily accessible when needed. "Druva aligns with our ISO compliance needs, ensuring that data is encrypted, immutable, and easily accessible," Merchant explained.

Enhanced Operational Efficiency  

The transition to Druva's cloud-based solution marked a turning point for Armanino, especially during periods of rapid expansion. Druva's scalability allowed seamless onboarding of new employees after each acquisition. "We use Druva as a migration path for the end users," Merchant explained.

Druva significantly streamlined the process. IT could install the Druva client on the employee's existing laptop, automatically back up all necessary data, deploy a new machine, and quickly restore the backed-up data to the new system. This automated and centralized approach drastically reduced the time and effort required for laptop setup, minimized downtime, and reduced the risk of data loss during transitions.

The solution's reliability and ease of use allowed Armanino to focus on growth, rather than IT infrastructure limitations. "I've never gotten any complaints from any of our guys," Merchant added. This highlights Druva’s impact on improving efficiency and enabling the IT team to prioritize strategic initiatives over constant maintenance.

Since implementing Druva, Armanino has reported "no security incidents with end-user devices." Maintenance time for backups was reduced to just four hours per week, allowing Merchant to focus on monitoring rather than troubleshooting. "As an enterprise-level organization, we spend no more than four hours a week managing our backups with Druva," he shared. "Previously, our backup tools often failed due to corruption and incomplete processes—issues that Druva has completely resolved."

Druva’s user-friendly interface also had a noticeable impact on employee satisfaction. “Druva is one of the few vendors I don’t receive regular complaints on. I’ve actually never had an end-user complain about the Druva solution, which is a testament to the product.” Merchant proudly stated—an uncommon achievement in IT.  

For Armanino, Druva proved to be more than just a technical upgrade. It provided a reliable, scalable, and user-friendly solution that supported the firm's compliance needs and operational goals. In a highly regulated industry, Druva is an invaluable partner for ensuring data integrity and peace of mind.