Frontier Silicon embraces Office 365 cloud data protection

Founded in 2001, Frontier Silicon Ltd. is the world’s leading supplier of technology solutions for digital radio and smart audio devices. The company is headquartered in London, with engineering, sales, and operations teams worldwide. Frontier Silicon is the market leader in consumer digital audio broadcasting (DAB) radios and is rapidly expanding into Internet radio and the broader world of Wi-Fi–enabled speakers (smart audio).

Like many companies, Frontier Silicon is embracing the cost and performance benefits of cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) applications such as Office 365. As Neil Bingham, the director of IT and cloud operations at Frontier Silicon, explains: “It’s not just Druva that we moved to the cloud in the past six months. It’s the general policy to move everything.”

Bingham’s IT group supports over 200 employees worldwide, which includes a large number of remote workers. This makes endpoint backup and data management of all resources critically important.

Another important issue is legal-hold and data-compliance management. Frontier Silicon needs to retain data for 10 years to comply with eDiscovery requirements. This can be especially challenging when the workforce mistakenly believes that cloud SaaS applications like Office 365 adequately back up their work, but as Bingham emphasized, the fact of the matter is that “companies do need to back up their cloud data.” The IT group also needs to immediately identify and remediate at-rest sensitive data risks.

As a small yet highly responsive IT team, Neil’s group has limited time and resources to devote to setting up new solutions or managing them once they’re up and running. The team needed a solution that would be easy to get going and easy to maintain, occupying as little bandwidth as possible.

As part of their migration to Office 365, Frontier Silicon wanted IT to have a single access point for viewing, managing, and recovering end-user data, whether on-premises (on-prem) or in the cloud. Their Druva InSync deployment brings disparate data sources together and empowers the organization to quickly identify data risks, place legal holds, and monitor and track their data to better adhere to company data-governance and industry-compliance regulations. With InSync, remote teams in Europe and Asia have been able to back up to local clouds while IT maintains a unified view of what’s going on across all instances.

According to Bingham, set up and maintenance has been easy: “It’s quite hands-off, which is great!” In addition, administrators at Frontier Silicon can determine how much control users have regarding their backups, such as whether the backup schedule can be changed, backups can be paused, backup folders can be altered, or settings can be changed. Administrators can set a per-user quota, set limits on the number of devices users can back up with inSync, and control when a device is deemed inactive.

Apps like Office 365, generally don’t give you adequate backup, compliance, or other critical features.”

— Neil Bingham, Director of IT and Cloud Operations at Frontier Silicon Ltd.