Customer Story

From Disaster to Ransomware Resilience: How FloraCraft Leverages Druva for Enhanced Security

50%

Reduction in time to manage backups with Druva – no hardware or on-prem infrastructure required

100%

Improvement in data security posture by adding Druva’s Accelerated Ransomware Recovery solution

About FloraCraft

FloraCraft is the world's leading manufacturer of foam products for the craft and floral industries. From its headquarters in Ludington, Michigan, FloraCraft and its 200+ employees provide innovative, American-made products to Walmart, Amazon, Michaels, JOANN, Hobby Lobby, and other leading retailers.

The Challenge

The FloraCraft team has had their fair share of IT challenges. For example, the time when the primary instance of their ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) virtual machine was lost. When the team went to recover a backup, they discovered it was corrupted, resulting in the loss of six months of ERP data. The only saving grace was that they had made clones of that VM and were able to recover some of the data.

This disaster put the spotlight on developing a healthy data protection routine for critical data. They adopted Veeam to protect their highly virtualized environment. However, FloraCraft sought to adopt a cloud-first approach. They began to use Microsoft 365, meaning their on-prem file servers were replaced by SharePoint and OneDrive for Business, and Exchange Online instead of on-premises. This introduced a new gap in their data protection strategy that they were not comfortable with given their previous experience of losing data.

At the time, Veeam did not have cloud connectors or the ability to back up endpoints. They learned after their first major data loss that they never wanted to be in a situation where they had to tell stakeholders that the data is “just gone."

The team also adopted a cloud-based ERP system after the incident. However, they still needed a way to back up the legacy on-premises ERP system. As the company grows, FloraCraft is moving more data into the Microsoft cloud, with the goal of retiring its on-premises VMware cluster.

The team is also committed to providing the best experience possible to their internal customers. But that gets hectic since the IT team is small.

Backups are one area where people don’t see the work that is required to maintain the system. Specifically because the data center hygiene practices fell through the cracks when the small team was so busy, and ultimately that led to a catastrophic data loss scenario.

The Solution

The team began to research potential solutions on the web and found a potential solution in the Druva Data Security Cloud. The CDW team connected FloraCraft with Druva to get all of the team’s questions answered.

Druva is a single, unified platform that enables the secure backup, management, and recovery of data across the IT stack. All of the data is hosted and managed by Duva in the cloud, so there is no hardware or software to update, patch, or manage. 

Druva protects FloraCraft’s SaaS application data including its Microsoft 365 accounts. The protection of its Microsoft 365 data added with end-user device protection via a single console made Druva the optimal choice. Specifically reassuring to them is Druva’s built-in zero-trust security for accessing backups, and the control plane is air-gapped and secured in the cloud environment. The FloraCraft team took the extra step of enabling Druva’s Accelerated Ransomware Recovery solution so that they will never face the prospect of lost data again and can ensure recovery is efficient.

The Results

As FloraCraft began to execute on its cloud-first strategy, it became clear that there were gaps in data protection. While looking for new solutions, the primary objective was to find a cloud-based solution to work with Microsoft 365 and VMware that was secure and reliable.

Another reason for a cloud-based solution was that the small IT team had limited time. The IT manager explained, “With Druva, every hour that isn’t spent supporting hardware can be spent on other tasks. With our previous solution, there were hidden costs for maintaining, replacing, powering, finding enough space for hardware, carrying support, and high availability options, all of which added up and STILL resulted in coming up short when compared to what Druva offers."

Since partnering with Druva, the IT manager shared, “IT staff is able to focus on other projects, knowing that backups are secure and taken care of– Druva allows us to check the backup requirements and security boxes on our insurance forms by meeting the demands in an ever-riskier data environment.”

With Druva, FloraCraft experiences a more secure and reliable environment where they’re now able to handle the protection of servers, Microsoft 365 accounts, and end-user devices on one consolidated platform. Before moving to Druva, the IT manager shared, “With Veeam, users had to work with an IT admin to find and recover a file (if it still existed in an uncorrupted state). With Druva, users can recover their own files, freeing up our IT team’s time.”

They continued, “A goal at FloraCraft is to continuously improve our security posture. Someone could click on something or bring in something that they shouldn't, and despite your best precautions, it is not hard for something like that to slip through.”

With the understanding that remediating all risks is not possible, but best efforts to minimize vulnerabilities is key. The FloraCraft teams know that should an attack happen, it would take the small team a long time to manually go through thousands of files to find which ones were not corrupted. And yet they have peace of mind with Druva, sharing, “It’s great to have the Accelerated Ransomware Recovery capabilities built into the Druva solution. It’s just the next iteration, and it's nice to already have that offered from Druva.”

The FloraCraft team has come a long way from the unreliable, home-grown data protection system that led to devastating data loss. According to the IT Manager, “Since implementing Druva we have moved to Cato, a SASE for cloud-based firewall, VPN, networking, and MDR. We have also moved to MS Defender for endpoint and partnered with Red Canary for monitoring the Defender logs. We are working towards a passwordless, zero-trust environment.”

Overview

  • 50% of the IT team’s time saved compared to when using Veeam
  • 100% improved security posture against ransomware
  • All backup and security requirements exceeded for cyber insurance