TRC Companies Relies on Druva as Key Data Protection Partner Through M&A Activity

TRC Companies, Inc. is a global firm providing environmentally focused and digitally powered solutions that address local needs. An innovator for more than 50 years, they serve clients who require consulting, construction, engineering, and management services, combining science with the latest technology to devise solutions that stand the test of time. They have approximately 150 sites in the mainland U.S., Puerto Rico, the UK, India, and Australia, and nearly 6,000 professionals. TRC is ranked #20 on ENR’s list of the Top 500 Design Firms in the United States.

Rob Petrone, VP of Information Technology for TRC, has seen nearly everything during his 20 years with the company. He said that mergers and acquisitions (M&A) drive most of the company’s corporate growth. According to Petrone, nearly every acquisition has come with different data protection and backup challenges. Shockingly, he’s found that some of the smaller acquisitions still protect data by replicating to a hard drive that leaves with an employee every night for safekeeping.

As TRC grew, the IT team had its hands full. They had to integrate the proliferation of offices, many of which came with dedicated on-site IT staff. The new sites were globally distributed and used a variety of different, often incompatible tools. The corporate backup infrastructure consisted of everything — tape drives, NAS appliances, and even USB-based hard drives. Before TRC moved to the cloud, it had four different backup solutions at one time in its data center just to cover backup and recovery for acquired companies. According to Petrone, “I couldn't say with a straight face that we could recover data that was 2 weeks old."

Adding to its challenges, the team didn’t just back up data for newly acquired companies, they were also responsible for data retention and disaster recovery. The team needed to be able to recover their data from the location at any time to ensure their business could continue to operate seamlessly.

As TRC began the search for a comprehensive answer to its data management challenges, it wanted a company that was born in the cloud. The solution needed to meet their current operational needs and be able to scale to meet future requirements. TRC didn’t want something that required looking into several different consoles. Petrone shared, “I wanted to be able to look in a single pane of glass, see how we're performing, evaluate any failures, and see what's going on there.”

After exploring solutions, the TRC team chose Druva to solve its data protection challenges. The company’s rationale was simple — the system would need to handle not only their current operational needs but also be capable of scaling to meet future requirements. Druva met the team’s requirements of a solution born in the cloud and optimized to leverage the efficiencies of the cloud for on-demand scale while providing a single management console. In addition, Druva combines the security and global reach of AWS with the unrivaled cost savings of global deduplication to efficiently store TRC’s server data.

Given the success of the partnership, TRC has expanded use of the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud several times since becoming customers in 2016.

As a 100% SaaS-based solution, Druva provides all-in-one backup, disaster recovery (DR), archival, and analytics — all things that were important to Petrone: “Scalability, the recovery, the ability to have a fully managed single pane of glass are very important to me when we first kick-off a solution.” Druva simplified data protection at TRC. Using a single console, the team can now see how they are performing at all sites around the globe. 

Security is one of the things that used to keep Petrone up at night. Druva helped him sleep easier, especially when it came to mergers and acquisitions. He gave the example of a newly acquired office in India that had local data. According to Petrone, “We were able to utilize Druva to back that up immediately even before we did the IT integration to bring the office into our network." Even if data were to disappear locally, the team has a backup set available to ensure retention needs are met. “Druva is going to continue to help us solve that challenge." 

An example of these capabilities came when storms in Ohio and Maine, and a fire in Oregon caused power to go out in offices. Druva helped the team rapidly recover via the cloud. Petrone reports, “We have the ability now to be able to recover that data anywhere in an emergency. Without Druva, we wouldn’t have had access to that data quickly and wouldn’t have been able to share it with our employees to keep them productive."

During the Oregon outage, the IT team needed to recover data quickly and remotely because the team is billable. As Petrone points out, “In the Oregon fire scenario, we saved our team 8 hours of data recovery in just a few minutes. With folks billable at X number dollars, 8 hours times that amount plus the frustration has a real-world effect that people don't always see.”

Since Petrone has a close relationship with the Druva team, they’ve been able to influence product enhancements to Druva features such as reporting and noted the importance of a vendor that listens to feedback and provides updates on its product. “It's easy to be transactional as a company, and then sell someone credits to do work. But it's another to be a partner, and if something's not working, find a solution for both parties. And I can honestly say Druva’s been that partner for us," he said.