SoFi Invests in Data Protection With Druva and Further Secures Customers’ Finances

SoFi is an all-in-one personal finance company with a mission to help its millions of members achieve financial independence to realize their ambitions. They create modern financial products and services that help people borrow, save, spend, invest, and protect their money better, so that they can get their money right.

Shannon Bradley is a senior systems engineer on the infrastructure team at SoFi. Her team manages the Windows servers in the environment including patching and backing up the systems. SoFi has a cloud-first policy, and they are in the middle of decommissioning all of their physical servers. The team is already following DevOps practices, using Terraform and GitLab to spin up new infrastructure in the AWS.

The team previously used a different vendor to back up their environments. Bradley described the system as “a pretty old antiquated system," not to mention expensive. For instance, the product did not offer deduplication for the backed-up data. Additionally, the interface to the backup software was not intuitive. Bradley explained: “With that platform, I could go in and look at our configuration and the status of backup jobs. And that was it.“

Bradley spent a lot of time opening tickets with the vendor to solve basic problems. She shared, “I was opening a ticket or following up with them every week on support-related items." This was not only a hassle, but all that time being used to chase backups could have been better used on the team’s cloud migration initiatives.

The last straw was when Bradley had to open a ticket with the vendor’s team because a backup that should have taken a few hours took several days. Bradley reports, “I ended up having the ticket open for about six months, and just couldn't get them to respond at all."

Bradley set out to find a more modern data protection solution. Her research, which included the Gartner Magic Quadrant, led her to the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud. She chose Druva because it would allow her to protect their AWS infrastructure, including Amazon EC2 instances, as well as Hyper-V on-premises servers, under a single pane of glass solution.

In addition, the cost-effectiveness of the solution allowed the SoFi team to engage with Druva Professional Services to make their implementation a hassle-free experience.

The Druva platform solved several requirements for SoFi’s environments. It offered the global deduplication of data to lower their storage costs, and modern SaaS capabilities allow the team to reduce data protection and management complexity. Bradley reported, “Once we saw the Druva solution in action, it was a no-brainer really to make the switch."

Bradley now sees much more information about the backup environment via Druva’s global dashboard. It provides an overview of the protection status of their AWS services within their accounts. Bradley follows a daily checklist that includes signing into the Druva console as well as checking the daily reports. She commented, “The Druva dashboard information is super nice to have in one place when you sign in — it’s all under one single pane of glass.”

She gathers KPIs and metrics every morning to share with her team. One metric she's particularly excited about is that their daily reports show backups have been 100% successful since moving to Druva. This is a welcome change after their previous backups would run for days without completing.

The team uses the Druva interface to easily back up their Amazon EC2 instances to different regions. Now they can quickly identify backups and recover their data wherever needed.

Another benefit was that the SoFi team could store backups in the Druva Cloud. This gave them an air-gapped backup copy of their Amazon EC2 data that is completely isolated from their AWS environment. Bradley said, "That was a big benefit that we gained by switching to Druva. Having a backup copy of our data outside the environment really helps us protect against cyber threats."

Bradley was also happy with the onboarding process since it was SaaS-based. This meant there were no more backup servers or appliances to install, manage, patch, or maintain. She has regularly scheduled cadence meetings with her Druva customer success manager, a far cry from having tickets that stayed open for months. In fact, she says, "I haven't had to open up a ticket yet with Druva.”

Finally, Druva has enabled Bradley and her team to spend less time on managing the backups. She said, “The implementation of Druva has allowed our IT team to be much more effective and efficient with our time. Bringing in the Druva solution has been a phenomenal change for us."