Transgourmet protects critical Microsoft 365 data with the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud

Transgourmet is a French wholesaler of food and hygiene products for catering, bakery, and pastry professionals. There are several entities in the group, including Transgourmet Fruits and Légumes, which is the market leader for the distribution of fruit and vegetables in Paris and the surrounding region. Additional entities include Transgourmet Seafood, a specialist in the distribution and tailor-made preparation of seafood products, and Transgourmet Solutions, which is the group’s newest entity offering customers a portal of selected, negotiated, and packaged services.

The Transgourmet IT team supports 3,100 employees across 46 sites, and after its parent company, The Coop Group, migrated to Microsoft 365, it decided to do the same. “We had various tools in place for collaboration at Transgourmet which we replaced with Microsoft 365. Today, we use Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams for email, document sharing, access to external data, and video conferencing,” said Christian Giusti, head of infrastructure, telecoms, and operations for Transgourmet.

While Microsoft 365 enabled better collaboration, Transgourmet was at risk for ransomware, accidental data deletion, and data corruption. Instead, the team was dependent on Microsoft’s retention capabilities. “We were only retaining data for about one month,” Giusti said. Microsoft maintains a shared responsibility model for Microsoft 365 where it is responsible for maintaining platform uptime while the customer is responsible for the protection and long-term retention of the data.

Though most of Transgourmet’s IT infrastructure is virtualized on 350 VMware virtual machines (VMs) running in two data centers, the team didn’t have a cloud strategy. Giusti and team knew they needed to implement a comprehensive cloud strategy to facilitate compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), help mitigate ransomware risk, and facilitate data retention needs.

Though it had legacy solutions in place to protect data on the VMs, Giusti and team felt compelled to look for a cloud-native data resiliency solution for Microsoft 365. So it sought guidance from partner Axians, which helped Transgourmet evaluate many solutions, including Druva. The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud stood out for several reasons. “The autonomy of the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud, its retention capabilities, and the fact that we did not need to invest in any infrastructure, hardware, or software made Druva stand out,” Giusti said.

“Before Druva, we didn’t store data in the cloud,” said Giusti. “In only a few months’ time, Druva paved the way for us to trust the cloud. Today, we can keep valuable Microsoft 365 data as long as we want — six months, one year, or longer. We are so pleased with Druva that we are considering using it to back up our data center servers, including the VMs,” he added.

The implementation of the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud was done very quickly, as the solution was up and running within one hour. Druva’s ease of use drastically cuts down on management time, as it can be implemented and used by generalists. Additionally, the connection with Microsoft Active Directory was done fast and backups started automatically.

“The choice of Druva was made on simplicity,” Giusti said. “There was no need to have great technical knowledge to set it up. It was done automatically after just three clicks. It was that quick,” he added.

For its Microsoft 365 data, Transgourmet is able to facilitate compliance with GDPR and the requirement to protect personal data. Compliance with GDPR is critical as administrative fines can reach 20 million euros or 4% of annual global revenue.

Additionally, with Druva, the team not only has reliable backups but the ability to retain data and access it on-demand. “Before Druva, we only kept data for one month, we can now keep it much longer and access it whenever needed,” said Giusti. This is a facilitator of risk mitigation as the team has 24/7 access to backup data stored in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

With the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud successfully deployed, Transgourmet now has multi-layer defense against ransomware. Giusti’s team is confident its Microsoft 365 backup data is protected from encryption and deletion should a ransomware attack hit their organization.

Lastly, the team now has simplicity when it comes to data management for Microsoft 365 as the Druva implementation makes backups transparent for administrators. “We don’t have to worry about tape management. With Druva, there is an ease of operation and use which means our team doesn’t question if a backup occurred or not. It just happens automatically,” said Giusti.

In the future, Giusti’s team is looking forward to eliminating its on-premises disk and tape backup infrastructure in favor of cloud solutions. “Druva has opened our minds to the fact that we can save much more data to the cloud with immediate access,” he added.