OHEL protects business-critical data in Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Virtual Machines (VMs)

Brooklyn, New York-based OHEL Children’s Home and Family Services began as a small foster care agency in 1969. OHEL’s 1,300 employees provide social services to more than 17,000 individuals in the New York metropolitan area. The organization helps individuals confronted with trauma and mental health challenges, children and adults with developmental disabilities such as autism, Holocaust survivors, and seniors.

Over the last 50 years, this non-profit agency has scaled to provide services to more than 17,000 individuals, help thousands of foster children, and provide 24/7 residential care, and crisis intervention services.

To protect its data, OHEL launched a backup-as-a-service offering from a partner that was built on Veeam to protect data center workloads, and like its SQL servers, operated on approximately 60 VMware VMs. Then, as part of its cloud strategy, it decided to migrate from Exchange on-premises to Microsoft 365 for its 2,000 mailboxes, which would have required a separate deployment of Veeam.

OHEL IT decided its best option was to find a cloud-native data protection solution that would enable it to centrally manage backups for VMs and software-as-a-service applications like Microsoft 365 and Salesforce in a single pane.

OHEL evaluated Rubrik and other data protection solutions before launching a successful proof of concept (POC) with the Druva Cloud Platform. “When I started looking at other vendors, I found that they were all similar to Veeam in that none of them, except Druva, could offer us one cloud-native solution to protect VMs and SaaS applications,” said IT Infrastructure Manager, Aaron Matatov.

Shortly after OHEL launched its POC with Druva, the 2020 pandemic struck, and Matatov and team were able to extend the POC and leverage a new offer from Druva to help its prospective customers by giving them six months free data loss protection for Microsoft 365 (and endpoints).

That offer, combined with the fact that Druva was the only cloud-native data protection solution OHEL found which would also backup its new Salesforce implementation, demonstrated that the Druva Cloud Platform was the right choice. OHEL quickly expanded its service to include Druva inSync, as its Salesforce admin identified the product’s key advantages for protecting critical customer and donor-related data, and its decision on Druva accelerated its Salesforce purchase.

Aaron added his appreciation for Druva’s support and account management teams: “When we onboard new vendors we rarely hear from the account team again. But Druva’s account team consistently reached out to make sure we had everything we needed to get up and running.”

“I love Druva so much that I can’t stop bragging about it,” he added.

With the Druva Cloud Platform, OHEL manages and protects all data from Microsoft 365 and Salesforce, as well as data on its 60 VMs, which it can restore at multiple levels: full, file-level, and individual virtual disk. It centrally manages and retains data for years, an important advantage as OHEL deals with sensitive records.

“Managing sensitive records means we can’t delete anything and our data needs to be saved for compliance purposes. This is especially important where Exchange Online data in Microsoft 365 is concerned.

“We had an employee recently delete a large amount of emails, and we were able to fully restore the lost emails in minutes with the easy to use Druva Cloud Platform,” Aaron added.

With Druva, OHEL achieved greater cost and storage efficiencies and savings with global deduplication when compared with its legacy solution, which did not include managing cloud applications data. Aaron said, “With Druva we’re managing 19.69 terabytes (TB) of backup data, but leveraging Druva’s built-in global deduplication, we only use 8.27 TB of storage. That’s a 2.5X global deduplication savings.”

“Druva Support proactively reached out to us informing us that we could activate its long-term retention (LTR) capability to reduce storage space and costs. In a short amount of time we are already seeing savings in credits. Druva is a company that looks after its customers,” he added.

Additionally, Aaron has easily reduced time spent managing daily backups by more than 50%. “The Druva Cloud Platform helps us to ensure 24/7 business continuity. Even if we have a crisis like a hurricane or COVID-19, with Druva our teams access backups from anywhere in the world,” said Aaron.