Hope Global secures its servers — physical and virtual — as well as Microsoft 365, with Druva

Founded in 1883 as Hope Webbing Company in Pawtucket, Rhode Island Hope Global has become a worldwide manufacturer employing more than 1750+ team members. Building its reputation on high-quality products, components, and innovative manufacturing solutions, Hope Global is driven by excellence. With facilities in the US, Mexico, the Czech Republic, and China, Hope Global offers manufacturing wherever its customers need it to be.

In its 137+ years in business, Hope Global has transformed from an old textile business based in Rhode Island to a global supplier of automotive components. Over the last 25 years, it has quadrupled in size and has found it necessary to invest in infrastructure to support its growth.

In the last decade, Hope Global began to embrace a cloud-first strategy to improve the agility of IT and application development teams and to achieve the scalability it needed. It adopted software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications such as Microsoft 365, Box, and Salesforce for 330 users, while also maintaining some on-premises systems running on virtual machines (VMs).

To backup business-critical data on VMs, Windows and Linux servers at several locations, and in Microsoft 365, it used Veritas NetBackup and LTO tape drives for offsite storage. The tapes were rotated to Iron Mountain daily, but the biggest challenge the business faced, according to CIO, Tom Ferrucci, was the slow time to recover.

“Using Iron Mountain, we could recall the tapes and restore lost data in a day or two, but this didn’t align with our corporate cloud strategy. We needed better performance,” said Ferrucci.

The team initially tried using a cloud data protection solution, but reverted back to tape because the performance was even lower with this vendor’s solution. In addition to Veritas NetBackup, there was a small deployment of Carbonite used for server backup at one of the regional offices, but it didn’t meet the company’s enterprise-level needs.

“We wanted to consolidate multiple backup and recovery tools into one, modern cloud-based data protection solution. During the proof of concept (POC) with the Druva Cloud Platform, we saw a significant improvement in restore performance over the previous cloud solution we used,” said Ferrucci.

Druva’s team quickly allayed the performance concerns the CIO had regarding sending massive amounts of data over its network. “Druva’s professional services team really helped us mitigate any challenges that we may have faced during deployment,” added Ferrucci.

Hope Global deployed Druva Phoenix to protect VMs and physical servers across multiple locations and Druva inSync to protect its Microsoft 365 environment (Exchange Online and SharePoint Online). When the CIO’s team migrates data storage from Box to OneDrive, they’ll leverage Druva inSync to backup OneDrive. This will enable them to reduce the risks of data loss and non-compliance penalties as a result of gaps in Microsoft’s data retention policies and data recovery capabilities.

The Druva Cloud Platform helped the CIO achieve his top priority — significantly reducing the time to recovery. “We’ve slashed the time for recovery from up to eight hours down to a few minutes with Druva — about 90% faster. Our employees were used to having to wait a day for us to restore data before, and the feedback we’ve received since using Druva is one of astonishment at the speed of restoration,” said Ferrucci.

Not only has the Druva Cloud Platform given the CIO’s team confidence that they can recover anything it’s backing up, but it’s also increased visibility and the reputation of the IT team. “Our team has become more efficient leveraging the Druva Cloud Platform’s single pane of glass through which a small team can manage backups of Microsoft 365, VMs, and physical servers,” he added.

My team got up and running quickly on the Druva Cloud Platform. Before we partnered with Druva, it took four resources to manage our backup tools. Now one person can manage it because it doesn’t require a back-up specialist. We’ve easily cut up to 75% of our time managing the day-to-day backups. With Druva, I can do what I need to as a CIO: glance at the dashboard and know my team can recover anything in minutes,” he added.