Hero Future Energies expands data resilience with Druva, slashing management time by 99%

Hero Future Energies (HFE) carries an illustrious legacy of the Hero Group; a strategic decision of the Group to expand its horizon beyond the flagship automotive business and enter the domain of power generation from clean and renewable sources of energy. Established in 2012, HFE is one of India’s leading independent power producers with operating plants in wind, grid-connected solar, and rooftop solar.

Hero Future Energies’ IT team is small but impactful. The New Delhi-based renewable energy company runs on a three-person IT team – and that’s exactly how Vinod Sharma, Head of IT, wants it.

“We have a very limited team because we believe in the modern ideal platform where the systems do most of the heavy lifting,” said Sharma. “We only use our resources and intelligence to manage the systems. That way, we don’t create a personal dependency; we create a system dependency.”

That clearly puts a lot of pressure on the team to choose the right systems. Before Sharma joined, Hero Future Energies would back up the company’s data on-premises using tape drives. It was time-consuming and increased risk for the organization.

The team originally decided to invest in the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud to backup Microsoft Windows file servers and over more than 300 devices. That way, the team could be confident that their backup data was safe in the cloud because it was not susceptible to corruption or ransomware.

But there was more to be done. Sharma joined Hero Future Energies, and soon noticed the company’s Microsoft 365 data wasn’t being backed up. Instead, the company was relying on Microsoft’s native capabilities to restore data, including Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. This meant that there was no way to recover data older than 90 days, which exposed Hero Future Energies to data loss from accidental deletion and/or ransomware.

Sharma started exploring possible solutions to protect their data center and SaaS applications data.

The IT team had positive previous experiences with Druva, but it was critical the solution could expand as the company’s data storage needs changed. They evaluated other data protection solutions, but they didn’t make the cut due to the hardware and software costs as well as lack of scalability with the on-prem solutions.

“There is exponential growth in our data backup, so we wanted to be confident that the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud could grow with us,” Sharma said.

“We were definitely looking for a one-stop solution for all types of backups from on-premises systems like file servers to software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications,” Sharma added. “Our team is too busy to use multiple platforms to manage backups.”

The Druva solution soon proved the obvious choice, especially because the team was familiar with its dedicated support. “Druva post-sales support is fantastic,” Sharma said. “That type of supplier relationship plays such a key role for us in streamlining our IT environment. As we’ve learned, once you onboard any partner, if the services are not on par, it undermines everything else you’re trying to accomplish.”

Sharma also appreciated how easy it is to increase data storage capacity with the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud. “One of the best things about Druva is its token-based billing,” Sharma said. “We simply buy storage and consume it; it’s just that simple. With Druva, we really like that we only pay for what we need. That makes it quite easy to manage our budget while making sure we always have enough space for critical data backups.”

Hero Future Energies now leverages multiple Druva products to protect their data landscape. That means the team can recover its 22 terabytes (TB) of data confidently from isolated, full, forever backups from the Druva Cloud powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). “The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud gives us lots of confidence, but more importantly, it means we don’t have to think about backups or spend time managing infrastructure,” Sharma said. “That is the ultimate freedom.”

Plus, it takes a lot less time – 99 percent less time to be exact. The team used to spend up to two hours a day managing tape backups on premises. Now, it takes two minutes to check in with the Druva platform, if that, as the solution provides automated alerts. “Honestly, with Druva the backups take care of themselves,” Sharma said. “My team gets alerts by email if there is an action required, and it completely takes the guesswork out of backing up data.”

Druva frees up Sharma’s team to work on more pressing issues, like finding new ways to deliver excellent technology services to the rest of the business.

Alongside the benefit of saving time, the IT team also achieved 2.35x global deduplication storage savings with Druva.

But Hero Future Energies is just getting started with its Druva journey. Sharma is already looking at other ways to incorporate Druva to make the IT team’s life even more efficient.

“We’re now considering making Druva a key part of our disaster recovery (DR) plans,” Sharma said. “That shows we trust the Druva platform to do what it says, and to do it well.”