Pyrotek Achieves 20% TCO Savings Since Standardizing on the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud

Pyrotek is a global engineering leader creating innovative technical solutions and integrated system designs to improve efficiency and safety across a wide range of industries that include aluminum, automotive, aerospace, railroad, and high-tech manufacturing. Privately owned since 1956, Pyrotek supports customers globally in more than 35 countries and with over 90 locations worldwide.

As a global company with roughly 3,000 employees across 90 locations, Pyrotek was challenged to find a data protection solution with the flexibility and scale to cover the company’s global footprint in a cost-effective manner. Michael Brandley, Global IT Manager at Pyrotek, wears several hats in their IT organization, managing all infrastructure, software and IT systems. Two major challenges they’ve faced include scaling and managing costs associated with hardware and software partners.

Pyrotek had previously implemented two backup solutions from two different providers, Veeam and iland. Veeam was deployed to protect their data centers, while iland was implemented to protect Microsoft 365 data. During their tenure leveraging iland, Pyrotek found it to be insufficient in backing up their Microsoft 365 data, which required the company to remove it and quickly find another vendor.

Explained Brandley, “We understood that there are technical difficulties, especially when it comes to Microsoft backups. But, it [multiple failed recoveries] was really concerning and caused us to get out of our contract, since we oftentimes couldn’t restore. There were times, with iland, where we didn’t get a full backup of our environment for a week or two, which obviously isn’t acceptable.”

While searching for a replacement vendor to secure their Microsoft 365 data, they looked more closely at their data center approach. Focusing on their cloud transformation journey, Veeam’s delivery model had become incompatible with Pyrotek’s business goals. Additionally, they’re backing up several NAS devices they plan to retire within the next year. These challenges left them searching for a platform solution that could reduce operational complexity and improve reliability of Microsoft 365 and data center workloads, without large financial investments and time required to deploy new hardware.

Partnering with Insight Direct, Brandley evaluated the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud when searching for a cloud-native backup solution. Specifically, Pyrotek had a need to back up a small, remote office in São Paulo, Brazil. The placement of Druva’s regional coverage, via Amazon Web Services’ capabilities, allowed Pyrotek to store their data in a local AWS region in Brazil, rather than in another country. This later influenced Brandley’s decision to standardize on the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud to support their global presence – something they could not achieve with iland and Veeam. Partnering with Druva became the clear choice for data centers, remote and global offices, as well as SaaS applications.

Given the number of different countries where they operate and the importance of data resilience, Brandley’s team also adopted the Accelerated Ransomware Recovery features to provide them with enhanced tools for monitoring, detection, and recovery in the event of an attack. Today, Pyrotek protects 1,600 Microsoft 365 users (for apps including Sharepoint, Exchange, Teams, and OneDrive), four major data centers, and 60+ remote branch offices that need backup.

As compared to Pyrotek’s previous solutions, they achieved 30% time savings on managing backups, 3x global deduplication storage savings, and 20% total cost of ownership (TCO) savings, including hardware and software maintenance costs. Pyrotek also achieved 100% protection of their Microsoft 365 data, unlike with iland. Additionally, because the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud is natively built on AWS, they found that it can reach remote locations that competing vendors can’t.

“From the beginning, Druva’s setup has been very intuitive and easy to use. It just works,” said Brandley. “We don’t have to hassle with things that aren’t functioning as they should. We’ve never had a problem with backup recovery. Druva is a solid product.” According to Brandley, Druva’s ease of use is a huge advantage. Pyrotek is a small company that doesn’t have a backup or storage specialist, and Druva’s 100% SaaS platform proved to be an incredible asset, automating tedious, manual work that Pyrotek didn’t have the resources to hire for. He also added, “Druva’s support is the best I’ve ever had,” which has been incredibly important for their business-critical functions.

With security top of mind, they’re pleased with an extra layer of protection with the Accelerated Ransomware Recovery feature, an easy add-on that requires no configuration and guarantees fast recovery of data in the event of an attack, giving them peace of mind. Specifically, the feature halts backups from devices that could be contaminated and prevents restores from potentially contaminated snapshots.

By adopting a 100% SaaS backup solution, Pyrotek has significantly saved money on TCO, which combines both direct and indirect product expenses. These include hardware, software, operational and administrative costs, in addition to maintenance, technical support, and labor costs over time.

“Prior to Druva, server maintenance was a soft cost, but it’s a cost, so it all adds up,” said Brandley. “We determined that by switching to Druva, we’d save money and spend less time managing our environment, which has been true and has allowed us to reduce our overall total cost of ownership (TCO).”