Medical Indemnity Protection Society protects Microsoft 365, meets compliance requirements

Medical Indemnity Protection Society (MIPS) is a Membership organization which provides indemnity insurance for Australian healthcare practitioners. MIPS provides legal defense and support for members in some of their most difficult times, such as patient complaints, lawsuits, or when a regulator investigates their practice.

MIPS supports healthcare practitioners across Australia. It carries significant overheads and other regulatory requirements, equivalent to large insurers, so every dollar counts, according to Lucian Burns, Head of Technology at MIPS.

“We operate in a stringent regulatory environment with limited resources,” Burns explained. “We were moving business information from legacy to cloud systems and were looking to leverage the Microsoft stack for extended value.”

That’s why MIPS moved its core business information from maintenance-intensive legacy IT systems to Microsoft 365 and Azure cloud, as a more efficient solution.

“That brought new challenges, like the best way to protect cloud information in a manner that is compliant and cost effective.”

Burns knew that Microsoft’s shared responsibility model put the onus on MIPS to protect its long-term data in case of accidental or malicious deletion. MIPS, therefore, looked beyond its legacy Veeam and on-premises solutions to seek better opportunities and start afresh.

“Strategically, we were moving information to the cloud, but we were falling short on protections like backup and data management. From a regulatory and compliance perspective, we needed a more comprehensive recovery solution,” said Burns. “We were looking for a cost-effective, low-touch, and seamless solution that was out-of-the-box and aligned to our strategy.”

MIPS evaluated solutions in the market and sought advice from Gartner, who introduced Druva, a Visionary in the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions.

“It’s easy to tell a good Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider from a poor one,” Burns said. “The good ones have a ready proof-of-concept, transparent pricing, and an approach that lets you know exactly what you’re getting, which made Druva stand out.”

MIPS conducted a proof of value, as Burns said, “The ability of Druva to stand up a fully functional trial system made it an easy choice for return on value, we were able to thoughtfully evaluate the entire solution and features.”

On trial outcomes, Burns said, “It was really easy to restore files, either in-place, elsewhere or download,” he added “The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud provides all the necessary options to recover point-in-time snapshots for Microsoft 365.”

MIPS was satisfied that the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud provided an easy deployment and would help protect its cloud strategy. “Druva’s customer support team were exceptional and promoted both our trial and production roll-out,” he said. “They set the standard for how support teams should operate, I could not be more complimentary.”

MIPS now has Druva supporting resilient, scalable, and cloud-native information protection for Microsoft 365 data that can grow on-demand. But for Burns, it was always about more than just features.

“The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud works well and helps protect our data,” Burns said. “Druva is intuitive, low maintenance, and supported by a great team, which is everything we need.”

MIPS put the Druva platform to test shortly after the pandemic started. Burns knew the shift to remote working would mean the company would rely on Microsoft Teams much more than before, so he migrated all SharePoint content across to Teams. It turned out that was too big of a shift for staff, so he had to quickly roll back the migration.

“We knew Teams was the answer, but we went too soon and without preparation, we needed to roll back quickly. With Druva we were able to restore everything easily and reliably to known snapshots,” Burns said. “We were able to restore our entire SharePoint data and Druva delivered peace of mind at a very stressful time for everyone.”

Burns was also impressed by the support of Druva’s development team. “We raised a minor support ticket, to investigate an issue between timestamps on backups versus restore points,” he said. “The resulting fix was accommodated and shortly thereafter, rolled out globally. It is amazing to work with a company that responds at that pace.”

Ultimately, Burns says the best part about Druva is how little he needs to think about it. “The great thing about Druva is that it is set and forget it,’” he said. “It does exactly what we need, hassle free, value for money, and no surprises.”