Policy Services protects physical servers, NAS file servers, and Office 365 data with Druva Cloud Platform

Policy Services is a family run independent financial adviser formed in 2002 in Linlithgow, Scotland. They deliver services to both financial advisers and policyholders. For advisers they offer online access to client account information, helping advisers reduce their in-house costs and obligations. For policyholders, they provide administrative services and market advice when required.

Lewis Barbour, Head of IT for Policy Services, is responsible for ensuring that the entire technology infrastructure runs smoothly 24×7, which is critical to maintaining a solid brand reputation for the company, their 3,000 advisers, and, ultimately the 400,000 clients managed by those advisers.

“We need to enable advisers and clients to access their policies via a web portal, meaning we must make sure that 3.5 terabytes of data is safe, backed up, and recoverable should disaster strike,” said Lewis.

He added, “Our IT environment is all physical Linux and NAS servers, which were being manually backed up nightly to a physical server in London. We transitioned to Office 365 a few years ago, but email for strategic users was only being archived using Mimecast, which meant IT couldn’t easily retrieve email.”

To support GDPR, stringent recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO), and manage significant data growth, Lewis’ team needed to migrate data protection to the cloud. “We focused on implementing a cloud-first strategy to manage all data and either prevent ransomware attacks, or be able to recover that data very quickly should loss occur.”

“We looked at both Druva and Veeam for Office 365, but found that Veeam would require us to have our own AWS storage, meaning the cost would be much higher than Druva. Additionally, Veeam would not have been optimal to backup our mixed operating system Linux servers.”

“Druva, being a 100% SaaS platforms built on AWS was a key factor in its selection, as it eliminates the need for us to have another server or virtual machine to run the backup software. Druva handles all of it.”

“The actual implementation of Druva inSync was dead easy because there was no set up. We started with Office 365. I provided a list of usernames and when the proof of concept transitioned into production, all users were added automatically for me. We then started backing up our physical servers and NAS file servers with Phoenix,” said Lewis.

With Druva, Policy Services has complete confidence that their data is safe. “Druva ensures that we don’t lose data, which means no complaints from our clients or risk of having to pay out compensation if a breach occurs,” said Lewis.

He added, “The cloud backup and recovery solution we have with Druva is a great facilitator of Policy Services’ brand value and our brand reputation. 100% of all data we manage is available 24×7. If we need to go to another office temporarily, or set up a new server in a different location, Druva ensures we have all the backups for Office 365 and our physical servers. We can just pull them down from the cloud, which is a big value add to our brand.”

“Before Druva it could take a couple of days to fully restore an inbox. Now, we can get individual emails, restore full inboxes either to the same inbox, a different inbox, or as a download in just minutes.” 

“Druva sits in the background backing everything up twice a day for our email inboxes and none of the users notice any impact. It’s fair to say that Druva is exceeding our RTO and RPO goals,” said Lewis.

Policy Services has to comply with GDPR, and leveraging Druva is an advantage. “If a data protection issue arises, with Druva we can easily search, collect, preserve, archive or delete data to support legal and GDPR compliance needs.

“Druva gives us full data visibility and 24×7 access so we can do compliance monitoring across our physical servers and Office 365,” said Lewis.

Additionally, Lewis and team have ransomware protection with Druva. “Protecting against ransomware is a number one priority and Druva has very straightforward mechanisms for protecting against it,” Lewis said.

“Since implementing Druva we’re now recouping costs, as we don’t have to rent physical backup servers. Druva has also eliminated server maintenance costs and given us total control of our backup. This is a huge time saver for IT,” added Lewis.