Crown Worldwide Group secures business-critical data across three data centers with Druva

Crown Worldwide Group is a privately-owned global logistics company founded in 1965 and headquartered in Hong Kong. Crown is committed to making it simpler to live, work, and do business anywhere in the world. The Group manages a broad portfolio of complementary brands, including Crown Workspace, Crown World Mobility, Crown Relocations, Crown Records Management, Crown Fine Art, Crown Logistics, and Crown Wine Cellars.

Crown Worldwide Group is trusted to move and store some of the world’s most valuable possessions — including the Mona Lisa.

With employees and facilities across the globe, the group’s IT teams have a monumental job. The company’s IT infrastructure is managed across three data centers in Hong Kong, London, and Sydney, with business-critical applications running on hundreds of VMware virtual machines (VMs), plus on-premises file servers.

Not long ago, the company used tape to back up VM data, and as disks became cheaper it transitioned to disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) backups through Arcserve. But the process soon became too time-consuming, resource-intensive, and unreliable. Plus, each region controlled its own D2D2T process, a process that lacked centralized visibility and management of backups.

“Every backup became more unmanageable, and restoring a single file was a huge job — which made it all the more frustrating if it failed,” said Chris Davis-Pipe, VP of IT. He wanted a better way to protect data that also supported the growing company’s goals — like increasing cyber resilience and adopting a cloud-first strategy.

“Our growth was incompatible with our ability to do a backup,” Davis-Pipe said. “The whole company runs on Microsoft SQL, and any data loss would be catastrophic. Plus, we wanted to accelerate our cloud projects and that couldn’t happen with D2D2T. That’s why we needed a safe, cloud-based way of backing up our data.”

Chris considered several solutions, including Veeam, Microsoft Azure Backup, Rubrik with Pure Storage, and Druva. But, working with partner Cloud Ocean Technology Company, he soon ruled out Veeam because of its on-premises infrastructure requirement.

“We didn’t want to have any new boxes that would need to be maintained and could fail,” Davis-Pipe said. “That would miss the whole point of a cloud-first strategy.” He soon decided cloud-native Druva was the best fit for the team’s objectives and conducted a two-week proof of concept.

He tested backup and restores of the crucial Microsoft SQL database running on VMs in both the UK and Hong Kong data centers.

“Obviously we wanted to see if the backups and restores were successful, which they were,” Davis-Pipe said. “But equally important, we had to be sure our teams could actually experience that single pane of glass management, so the team in Hong Kong would have access to the same data as the UK team.”

After seeing how simple and painless it was, he knew Druva was the right choice to protect Crown Worldwide Group’s VM and file server data.

Now Davis-Pipe and team have the modern, cloud-based data protection solution his team needs to manage backups and restores from anywhere in the world.

That cloud-first strategy it deployed for data protection proved essential when COVID-19 struck. “I was so relieved we switched from tapes to Druva before the pandemic,” Davis-Pipe said. “Once regional lockdowns started affecting our teams, there was no way they could have entered a physical building to swap tapes.” That’s why he considers Druva a facilitator of Crown Worldwide Group’s business continuity planning (BCP).

Now, data management is more accessible, reliable, and effortless. The team can restore data 48 times faster using Druva compared to Arcserve. And there’s centralized backup visibility at the top, while each data center team manages its own backups and takes action when needed.

It’s also saving money by paying for only the storage it needs. In fact, the team’s achieved an impressive 2.6x global deduplication storage savings across the three data centers. Not to mention cost avoidance of future hardware and consumables, like new tape drives, tapes, and additional disk storage.

And of course, Davis-Pipe finally has confidence that the company’s data protection is compliant with legislation like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). “The nature of our business means we move personally identifiable information (PII) across the globe, so protecting that data is very important to us and we need to be able to demonstrate our compliance to our clients,” he said. “Having a solution like Druva in place makes it a lot easier.”

Going forward, the team plans to protect even more VMs with Druva, and look at backing up the growing number of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications it uses.