Forest of Dean Trust Reduces Costs by 25% and Eliminates Supply Chain Issues With Druva

The Forest of Dean Trust is a family of schools situated in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, England. They work with the community and know that raising aspirations and supporting the pursuit of dreams is not straightforward. It is committed to listening, challenging, and supporting its students and staff and knows that everybody experiences a different journey. The Trust has a genuine partnership between students, staff, and parents/careers to support the pursuit of its vision.

The Forest of Dean Trust’s ICT environment includes virtual machines (Microsoft Hyper-V) and network attached storage (NAS), which run on-premises.

With The Trust’s prior solution, each VM backup had to be managed individually, a process that was expensive and prone to errors. It was also time consuming for the lean, busy ICT team.

Additionally, the team also protected a Synology NAS environment with Veeam storing backups both locally and online using Google Workspace. But, this posed a significant barrier to data recovery, as the team needed a working Synology server on-premises in order to recover backups, according to Emily Stigant, ICT Manager, Forest of Dean Trust.

“With Synology, if we had a data corruption event, copies of that data would have been backed up to the cloud in Google Workspace,” Stigant explained. “If that happened or our Synology solution went down, we had no way to recover viable NAS data.”

In fact, the team had previously experienced a host server failure that left them unable to recover six VMs. So Stigant decided to look to AWS Marketplace for a new data resiliency solution.

“We wanted a data resiliency solution that was easy to use, simple to learn, and just worked,” Stigant said. “A solution that would give us full confidence that we could rebuild our network quickly if a ransomware attack were to happen.”

Stigant knew Veeam would not work for The Trust anymore because it was increasingly expensive and required on-premises equipment. So she considered Microsoft Azure Backup Services for the Hyper-V virtual machines, but the cost was prohibitive. Arcserve was also a contender, but it was too maintenance intensive.

That’s when Stigant saw a demo of the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud. She instantly appreciated its simple user interface and the fact it was a cloud-native software-as-aservice (SaaS) solution.

“I could see with Druva I wouldn’t have to worry about the hardware or anything that’s going on in Amazon Web Services (AWS),” Stigant said. “All I’d need to worry about is that I’ve got the right clients, the right data being backed-up on my servers, and those servers are communicating with the cloud.”

Plus, choosing Druva would mean no equipment shortage concerns. “Over the past two-plus years, we’ve had to delay so many projects because of hardware supply chain issues, which made a cloud-native solution even more attractive,” Stigant added.

So she conducted a trial of the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud and had a positive experience right from the start. “We had the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud up and running in half a day,” Stigant said. “And the support team at Druva is absolutely fantastic. If there was anything that I couldn’t get my head around, they were on it.”

Leveraging Druva, the Forest of Dean Trust team has the simplicity, visibility, and data protection it needs to operate confidently.

“The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud is truly set and forget it,” Stigant said. “It does everything it says on the tin.” And her team appreciates the proactive emails the Druva platform sends if something does need attention.

“The alerts give us a sense of security that we can trust Druva,” Stigant said. “I know when something’s wrong without having to manually check it all the time.”

The ICT team also appreciates having a single pane of glass to manage all VM and NAS backups. In fact, it means the team spends 25 percent less time managing backups using the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud compared to Veeam. But even that doesn’t quite capture the impact.

“With Veeam, we had to let a lot of security-related items slide because our team was so stretched,” Stigant said. “We could only manage backups on a monthly basis because it took half a day. Now, with Druva, we know we have clean, viable backups whenever needed, 24×7.”

The team is also saving a quarter of the previous maintenance costs because it doesn’t need to provision and manage on-premises hardware and software for backups. It frees up resources to invest in other technology for staff and students.

What’s next for Stigant’s team? Moving more infrastructure into the cloud. “We plan to get rid of Synology all together and transition over to site recovery in the cloud,” Stigant said. “So when we have the site fail-over, the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud will do our NAS backups and it’ll fail over to reserve site recovery.”