Intermountain Electronics + Druva: Advanced Ransomware Protection and 50% Cost Savings

Intermountain Electronics (IE) provides critical power and process infrastructure to virtually every industrial sector in North America. They offer an unparalleled mix of electro-mechanical capabilities, industry expertise, and flexibility, bringing you tomorrow’s power, automation, and control solutions – today. Operating for over 35 years and serving three continents and over a hundred Fortune 500 customers, IE provides fast, flexible, and scalable solutions for companies looking to streamline their electrical, mechanical, or IT systems.

Intermountain Electronics is a growth-oriented manufacturing company. They manufacture custom power solutions for data centers, power distribution, mining equipment, and solar energy, to name a few.

Adam Hilliker, the Director of IT at Intermountain Electronics (IE), has watched the company grow by 20% each of the six years he’s been with the company. That rapid growth has created a fast-paced environment, and the internal IT team must work hard to be sure the IT environment always works flawlessly. 

Hilliker and his team of nine are responsible for all technology across the board including manning the help desk and administering servers, software, networking, as well as security.

When Hilliker started at IE six years ago, there was no data protection platform in place, not even for email backups. They chose Unitrends as their solution and used it for a few years, but it wasn’t a great fit for a few reasons. Firstly, even though they put a backup appliance at every facility, Hilliker said, “We realized quickly that there was no way for us to continue growing with Unitrends as our backup solution. It could not keep up with our growth." 

Hilliker does his budget at the end of every year, but with Unitrends, he never could estimate what his backup costs would be. 

Far worse than the budgeting issue was not being able to recover data. Hilliker recalled, “My hope every day was that nobody put in a request for a recovery ticket. If we were lucky, it (recovery time) was 45 minutes. If we were unlucky, it would take 12 hours. It was basically to the point of being an unusable service."

They had this problem because the Unitrends solution only had a 90-day retention period. In fact, if they wanted to retain more than 90 days of data, additional fees would be charged, and after 90 days the data would be purged.

Another issue was protecting their business management data. IE hosts their ERP system locally using a SQL Server backend. Hilliker said, “Unitrends could not keep up with our personal requirements to back up that SQL Server database.”

As the company moved to Microsoft 365, an unfortunate event made Hilliker realize that they had no protection for the data in users’ mailboxes or for OneDrive. Before one employee left the company, they strategically deleted their emails so they couldn’t be recovered. When the IT team went to look for the emails, their mailbox was empty, and critical business information was gone forever. 

Another gap that Hilliker also realized was the need for file-level security against ransomware. The company already used Mimecast as an email security gateway and CrowdStrike for endpoint protection. But Hilliker also wanted to know that something beside him was keeping an eye on the server files.

IE’s CDW account representative introduced Hilliker to Druva and a few other vendors for consideration in 2022. After seeing the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud in action, Hilliker knew it would best meet their immediate needs, and allow them to scale protection as their company rapidly grows.

The organization adopted Druva to protect its Microsoft 365 data and hybrid workloads for VMware, Windows, and SQL Server. In addition, IE added Druva’s Accelerated Ransomware Recovery feature to ramp up its security efforts. The feature enables continuous monitoring of their security posture, detection of anomalies within backup data sets, expedited incident response, and accelerated data recovery should IE need to respond to an attack.

During their proof of concept with Druva, the first thing to stand out for Hilliker was the single pane of glass view. He could open the portal and see exactly how much data was stored, and that gave him the ability to estimate what backups would cost for the next year. 

Five years ago, IE didn’t even have a strategy to back up email on Microsoft 365. But since adopting Druva SaaS apps for Microsoft 365, Hilliker says when they have to recover something from email “It takes 30 seconds” to get the right file — that would have taken 45 minutes with IE’s previous solution. 

Druva also solved the challenges Unitrends had backing up the ERP system. Hilliker has the SQL Server backend backed up continually with Druva. He says, “With Druva, I don't have to worry about it. I know it's backing up. I don't think about it. If something bad happens, I can just pull those files back down and we can be up and running again in minutes.”

The solution is also a cost-saving tool when it comes to purchasing cyber security insurance. As Hilliker puts it, “Druva helps the insurance companies give a better discount on deductibles, which is a great value-add for customers." The fact that Ransomware Recovery is part of the Druva platform made it “a no-brainer." 

Hilliker sums up his experience with Druva this way: “We've been on Druva almost a full year. I freaking love this platform.”