Rovio Entertainment Dials Up Data Security With Druva and Keeps Gamers Active

Rovio Entertainment Oyj is a Finnish video game developer based in Espoo. They were founded in 2003 by Helsinki University of Technology students Niklas Hed, Jarno Väkeväinen, and Kim Dikert. In the early days, the company made games for Nokia handphones. Its 50th game release has been its most popular – Angry Birds. Last year they were acquired by game giant Sega.

Pekka Timonen is the Senior Manager of IT Services at Rovio. As the head of IT, he is responsible for a team of 10 that manages IT and security. Jyrki Valkonen is a Senior IT Service Specialist on his team. He’s responsible for all Windows servers that run Hyper-V and firewalls, as well as managing the data backup for the physical servers and Google Workspace accounts. 

One of the team’s biggest challenges with its previous vendor was that they could not be sure that data backups were actually happening and could be restored. Valkonen explained that backups weren’t being performed reliably. Its primary backup software was Backupify, but Timonen said, “With Backupify, we had no way of knowing if the backups were successful." 

Timonen added, “With our previous solution, there was no guarantee that whatever we had backed up over the years could be recovered." Timonen said the situation heightened his main concern — being attacked by ransomware. He reflected, “If we were hit by ransomware, we had no guaranteed way of restoring our data with Backupify."

Valkonen also worried about keeping the company’s on-premises data safe. However, having data to recover from a catastrophic event is only part of the problem. If they were actually able to conduct data restores, it was notorious for taking a long time. It became a large issue for Rovio as any time its games are down and not accessible by players, the company loses money and takes a hit to its reputation. As Timonen put it, “We knew we needed to search for a new data protection vendor who would ensure our data recovery time be as short as possible."

Rovio worked with its partner Gapps Oy to evaluate different data protection products.

As part of the AWS Independent Software Provider (ISV) Workload Migration program, the Rovio team adopted the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud and stopped worrying about backups. Not only was Rovio able to stop worrying about its backups, but the program allowed the team to optimize its AWS cloud costs and maximize ROI with Druva’s cloud cost optimization features. 

Now, collaboration data in Google Workspace and hybrid workload data for Hyper-V are backed up and protected 24/7 via the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud. An added bonus, Druva’s Accelerated Ransomware Recovery features ensure reduced time to restore access to its games in a worst-case scenario. The Rovio team also became early adopters of Druva’s $10M Data Resiliency Guarantee at no additional cost, which protects against five key risks – cybercrime, as well as human, application, operational, and environmental risks.

After a quick implementation of Druva, Valkonen reported, “The Druva solution was very easy to deploy, and only took a couple of months to roll out to the entire company.” Admins and users often make comments about just how easy it is to use Druva. The admins find the daily emails and alerts from the product enough to manage the platform, saying, “I don't even have to go into the Druva console on a regular basis. The quick glances at the email reports tell us Druva is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do." 

Timonen shared that there wasn’t a large price difference between Druva and comparable solutions, but now he has that sense of the data being secure and safe. To him, “The sense of data security we experience with Druva versus competing products has been unmatched." Since Rovio also has Accelerated Ransomware Recovery and Druva’s Data Resiliency Guarantee, they feel much safer and prepared in the event of ransomware or an outage. With proactively detecting anomalies with a ML-based algorithm, orchestrated response and recovery activities via built-in SIEM and SOAR integrations, and scanning snapshots for malware before recovery, Rovio knows they have the backing of a platform that will get its players back in the game quickly.