GameStop® leverages Druva to transform data protection and lower costs

GameStop Corp., a Fortune 500 company, is a global family of specialty retail brands that makes the most popular technologies affordable and simple. GameStop operates more than 7,200 stores Solution across 14 countries and includes retail outlets for AT&T and Apple products and services. The company’s consumer product network also includes web and print media that feature exclusive and unique video game and pop culture products.

Like most forward-thinking enterprises, GameStop recognizes cloud-based services as a primary resource for mission-critical business applications. From cost savings to scalability, the benefits are clear and significant. That’s why GameStop adopted a cloud- first directive and instituted a 24-month plan to migrate business processes from on-premises to the cloud, modernizing operations for better performance and greater efficiency.

Over the years, GameStop’s on-prem backup infrastructure and procedures had become complex, inefficient, and prohibitively expensive. Tape backups had been running since the ‘80s. Nine distinct backup solutions were in play globally, and every time new technology was rolled out, IT had to accommodate it with new reporting protocols, backup agents, and storage setups. It was managing both legacy and new equipment, and along with replication and offsite storage costs, expenses exceeded $1.5M annually. This also required IT staff to be experts in a number of technologies just to keep things running. Managing this infrastructure, and the associated offsite storage and replication costs, had simply become untenable—the company needed a better approach.

“We wanted a one-stop, scalable cloud solution for reporting, monitoring, and executing backups worldwide,” according to Chris.

The company needed flexibility in their approach to disaster recovery/business continuity, as well as efficient deduplication and data segmentation with backups to optimize short- and long-term storage; all while providing fast recovery and meeting business continuity SLAs. GameStop needed a provider with deep cloud expertise and a successful track record with their Fortune 500 peers. That’s when the company turned to Druva.

GameStop had previously used Druva inSync for endpoint and cloud-app backup for a retail network in France. After a successful deployment, this expanded to Canada and across Europe, quickly becoming a global deployment. As the company began to tackle its corporate-wide transformation to the cloud, GameStop turned to Druva Phoenix.

“What really excited us is that all aspects of Druva’s platform are distinctly cloud-native, unlike competitors who seem to have integrated the cloud as an afterthought,” said Chris. Druva Phoenix offers data availability and governance for GameStop’s enterprise infrastructure with a cloud-first approach—providing GameStop with high- performance, scalable backup, disaster recovery, archiving, and analytics to simplify data protection, improve visibility, and dramatically reduce the risk, cost, and effort of managing their complex information environment.

Originally, GameStop targeted a 40% reduction in OpEx for managing backups, but with Druva Phoenix, the company has seen a 70% in backup and recovery operating expenses. And the savings have proved consistent across the roll out to different regions and systems. And the benefits haven’t stopped there—GameStop has increased the backup footprint of their virtual machines by 20%, seamlessly protecting data that had previously been vulnerable. These were virtual machines that the team had always intended to protect, but hadn’t been able to get to. Druva Phoenix made this seamless, enabling the team to turn on protection for these virtual machines with just a few clicks and without the need for additional hardware. Furthermore, the Druva Phoenix CloudCache provides GameStop with high speed backups and restores, enabling the company to meet business continuity SLAs while still leveraging the cloud.

GameStop has also started to use Druva Phoenix to comply with data residency and compliance regulations in 14 regions, eliminating the need to replicate multiple backup technologies. This kind of data segmentation expertise saved GameStop over $1M in its European rollout alone.

“Throughout this journey, working with the Druva team has been awesome,” said Chris. “They’ve worked with our international teams on everything from technical issues to optimization, end-to-end as an enterprise. What’s been particularly heartening is how their commitment to cloud- first solutions has been picked up by our entire IT staff. Druva is providing a comprehensive feature set—and we’re not waiting. Druva is cloud first, cloud-born, and cutting edge. We want to be part of that journey.”

“We are actively looking into using cloud to lower our CapEx and increase ROI. With limited IT staffs, Cloud technology like Druva can helps us remove the tedious tasks of daily hardware management, frees our IT staff for more application related tasks, and helps drive focus more on business intelligence.”