Version 1 leverages Druva CloudRanger to win large, multiyear cloud-managed services contracts

Version 1 is an Irish company that’s trusted by global brands to deliver IT services and solutions. Its 1300-strong team works closely with technology partners to provide independent advice that helps its customers navigate the rapidly changing world of IT. An Amazon Web Services (AWS) Advanced Partner Network (APN) partner, Version 1 holds multiple AWS competencies and has more than 60 AWS-certified engineers.

Version 1 relies on AWS Marketplace for a range of applications and services to differentiate and augment its offerings. “Enterprises are looking to us to provide a complete environment for deploying and managing their cloud applications,” said Peter Smyth, head of managed services at Version 1.

One of the fundamental technologies for Version 1’s cloud managed services is backup and recovery. As the company built out its AWS practice, it required a solution that worked in harmony with other technologies on the platform, enabled rapid growth and scalability, and provided efficient ways to manage large amounts of data to reduce the burden on Version 1’s managed services staff.

The solution also had to meet stringent customer expectations. “Our customers won’t migrate applications to the cloud unless we can demonstrate an ability to back up and restore their data that is equal to or better than what they can do on-premises,” said Smyth.

Version 1 decided to implement a software-as-a-service (SaaS) backup solution provided by AWS APN partner, Druva CloudRanger, and delivered through AWS Marketplace. “We evaluated Druva CloudRanger against the other enterprise cloud backup products in AWS Marketplace. It was the only solution that provided similar levels of control and convenience compared to traditional enterprise backup products.

“Using Druva CloudRanger has helped us to provide the customer assurance necessary to win large, multiyear cloud managed services contracts with enterprise organizations,” said Smyth.

The solution is built on a foundation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for processing and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for data access. It uses Amazon CloudFront for content delivery, and AWS Certificate Manager, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), and AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) for security and authentication.

With Druva CloudRanger, Version 1 can deliver the performance its customers need, wherever they are located, by using Druva CloudRanger in the nearest AWS Region and Availability Zone.

“Druva CloudRanger gives us highly efficient visibility and control over our customers’ backups. Our managed services staff can stay on top of petabyte-scale storage. Druva CloudRanger saves them hundreds of hours annually in the management of backups and restores,” Smyth added.

Version 1 also optimizes customers’ cloud costs using Druva CloudRanger’s scheduling feature, which ensures customers’ cloud resources are only running when needed. This delivers savings of tens of thousands of euros to their customers per year. For example, turning off development and test instances that are only needed during business hours reduces costs by up to 70% compared to running them all the time.

Version 1 works with customers in highly regulated industries including healthcare and finance, so compliance, security, and reliability are critical. “Everything we do is based on best practices and certified to International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards,” Smyth said. “That enables us to deliver services to organizations under stringent requirements such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

“Getting Druva CloudRanger from the AWS Marketplace makes it incredibly simple to deploy in the AWS environment,” said Smyth. “We used CloudFormation scripts, supplied by Druva CloudRanger, to roll out backups to our whole customer estate in minutes rather than hours or days. That means we can get customers’ applications into service in the cloud that much faster,” he added.