Hitachi America Limited Uses Druva for Endpoint Backup and Governance for Cyber Resilience

Hitachi America, Ltd., is a Hitachi Group Company which, in collaboration with its subsidiaries, offers a broad range of products and services used by consumers across various industries. They have conducted years of research to develop digital solutions and manufacture high-quality products used across industries including automotive, power generation, energy management, and power generation infrastructure.

Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Hitachi America Limited, a subsidiary of Hitachi Limited and its group companies, offers a broad range of electronics, power and industrial equipment and services, particle beam therapy technologies, automotive products, and consumer electronics with operations throughout the Americas.

The company has a strong M&A strategy and works diligently to integrate acquired companies. But one of the challenges the company had, according to Senior IT Manager Lennox James, was that it wasn’t backing up PCs. “If a PC went down we were often unable to restore the data. When users would alert us to lost data, we either directed them to search through Microsoft 365 or we’d ship them an external hard drive. We also had no way to easily migrate data on PCs for newly acquired companies or do PC refresh,” said James.

“The problem with that approach was that our drives were usually encrypted, which proved to be an added layer of difficulty for end-user self-initiated data restoration,” he added.

James confirmed that IT was looking to enhance its environment for internal customers, and find and deploy a retention and backup system that could back up 2,000+ PCs while providing restore capabilities and cyber resilience.

“We were looking for a cloud-based data protection solution that would not impact PC performance. At that time, about five years ago, we were starting to modernize our environment and migrate to the cloud, finding a cloud-native solution was key,” said James.

James and his leadership team worked together to find a cloud-native backup system. They evaluated several solutions like CrashPlan and Symantec DLO, but the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud was the clear winner based on the simplicity, scale and savings that comes with Druva’s SaaS advantage.

“We are leveraging the Druva Data Resiliency cloud for endpoint backup and data governance for 2,000+ PCs, as well as for device migration and cyber resilience,” James said.

Druva enables remote wipe, the ability to encrypt data on lost or stolen devices, and rapid recovery of devices from snapshots. Hitachi America can automatically manage legal hold requests, migrate end-user data and settings without disrupting business and employee productivity, and recover from ransomware with air-gapped, isolated data.

Joe Jackson, who provides on-site support for Hitachi America group company Sullair, elaborated on how the company has deployed Druva. “New users are imported into the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud via Microsoft Active Directory. It’s very user-friendly and provides the ability to add users manually if needed.”

“Through the user-friendly Druva console, we can see how many backups have been performed on each of the 2,000+ PCs and which devices are active or on legal hold,” Jackson added. “If a PC is broken down, we leverage Druva to seamlessly migrate data to a new device.” According to Jackson, PC data migration with Druva is “one and done.” “Druva has been a lifesaver for us many times. We can refresh endpoints for provisioning much faster now,” he said.

Additionally, Jackson noted that Druva Support is very quick. “I can easily open a ticket, and have a fast response from Druva Support,” he said.

Over the last five years with Druva, Hitachi America has achieved some significant business outcomes, such as increased effectiveness in eDiscovery and legal hold. “The legal hold and preserve-in-place are working well. Our process leveraging Druva is to work with a designated legal custodian at each of our group companies who then creates the legal hold groups and uses Druva to ensure the data is not deleted,” said James.

Because the compliance, regulatory, and litigation environments are different across Hitachi America’s subsidiaries, having endpoint backup in a centralized location makes the legal hold and eDiscovery processes seamless and efficient. With Druva, Hitachi America’s legal custodians can store data by date range and file type, preserve data across endpoints, and identify legal hold data across users and devices.

James talked about the benefits of using Druva to facilitate acquisitions. “When Hitachi America acquired Sullair, we leveraged Druva to do discovery of what was on end users’ PCs to understand the application landscape and migrate data to new PCs. It’s a really secure in-place restore process — one which we did not have before.”

“Our users can also do restores themselves, which has reduced the IT support ticket volume by 20%,” Jackson added.

Additionally, James and his team have peace of mind that they’ve achieved cyber resilience and data governance for endpoints with Druva. “Whether it’s a cyber attack or a PC refresh, we can easily restore data with Druva much faster than before,” he said.