SG360° migrates data protection to the cloud with Druva to triple recovery speed and slash costs

SG360° is a full spectrum direct-to-mail producer specializing in delivering direct marketing communication that drives engagement and increases response rate. SG360° has been delivering innovative direct marketing communications for more than 60 years. The company leverages the power of print to create connected experiences, pushing the envelope to deliver inspired communications that are touched, shared, and remembered.

Before SG360° chose a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to protect its data center workloads, it juggled several on-premises storage and backup solutions. The company had grown by mergers and acquisition (M&A), meaning it had to manage hundreds of terabytes (TBs) of data across multiple locations.

As a result of its M&A strategy, SG360° used four different on-premises solutions — Tintri, Nimble, Retrospect, and tape drives — to store and backup data on NAS file servers, VMware virtual machines (VMs), and SQL databases. Tape-based disaster recovery (DR) impacted its service level agreements (SLAs). This made capacity planning nearly impossible and limited the development of SG360°’s cloud strategy.

It also made recovering data from different solutions time-consuming, as it could take days to restore lost data to a single location for hundreds of TBs. This increasingly complex data management made it difficult to control costs. “Dealing with that much data and backups on-premises got costly very quickly,” said Nathan Brown, System Engineer at SG360°. “It’s a vicious cycle, because you’re paying for expanding drives that require even more storage.”

The team also needed a more effective way to protect itself from ransomware attacks, another reason it wanted to move towards a cloud-first approach to data protection.

The team met with several vendors before launching proofs of concept (POCs) with Druva and Veeam. “We evaluated Veeam, but it just wasn’t as user friendly as Druva,” Nathan said. “And it was an on-premises solution, so it wasn’t the right direction.”

Druva was the clear choice after Nathan’s team achieved an impressive 3.7X global deduplication storage savings, freeing up storage for other business needs. “Getting storage back was an unexpected benefit,” Nathan said. “With Druva, we only pay for the storage we actually need.”

Nathan was also impressed with Druva’s multiple restore options for VMs: full, file-level, and individual virtual disk. Additionally, moving backups and searching through them was a simple, efficient process. “Of all the providers we considered, Druva’s interface made it the easiest to find files or direct folders and pull them down to a custom location,” Nathan said.

Druva was also the most cost effective solution. SG360° can now back up and protect its VMware, NAS file servers, and SQL data in one location — the cloud — with Druva. “It’s such a relief to not worry about updating software or hardware,” Nathan said. “Once we saw how many hours we’d save, choosing Druva was an easy decision.”

The migration from its previous backup solutions to Druva was smooth, and completed in about six weeks. “Druva Support made it an easy transition,” Nathan added.

Even during the roll-out, SG360° needed Druva’s superior data recovery capabilities when an SQL database was accidentally deleted. “One of our departments said they didn’t need a database any longer, so we removed it,” Nathan recalled. “But they thought we were pulling the data from somewhere else, and suddenly needed the database back. Without Druva, we would have had to recreate all that data, but we were able to pull it all back down the next day.”

SG360° can now recover data three times faster with Druva, and it has reduced the time spent managing data backups by 10X, from six hours a week to just 30 minutes.

“We’re not wasting time monitoring backups all day just to make sure they’re working the way we expect them to,” Nathan said. “With Druva, we know we’ll get a notification with the exact issue if there’s a hiccup.”

As a SaaS data protection solution, storage is infinitely scalable and capacity can be added on-demand. With Druva’s data protection advantages Nathan believes SG360° is in a great position — both now and in the future. “Druva grows with you,” he said. “We no longer have to worry about making room for more data. We’ll always have the space we need.”