Powering the Future: How Focused Energy Built Scalable Cyber Resilience with Druva

Focused Energy is a laser-driven fusion company working to bring clean, abundant fusion power at commercial scale. With operations in Austin, Texas, and Darmstadt, Germany, the company brings together scientists and engineers developing new technologies to make fusion a viable source of energy.

Its ambitions are equally significant. Focused Energy plans to develop a pilot laser-driven fusion power plant in Biblis, Germany, to ramp up the technology’s production. Supporting that mission requires an IT environment capable of evolving nearly as quickly as the science itself.

Developing a first-of-its-kind fusion technology requires Focused Energy to continually experiment, learn, and iterate. Scientists and engineers need the freedom to build new models, test new approaches, generate new types of data, and quickly apply what they learn to the next iteration.

The scale of that data can be immense. A single experimental fusion laser can generate approximately 1.5 terabytes. Rather than sending every computational workload to the cloud, Focused Energy equips its researchers with laptops that run models locally at a predictable cost.

This creates a data protection challenge. Locally generated research data does not always fit neatly within SaaS applications, document management platforms, or file-syncing tools. If a device fails or data is lost, valuable scientific work would be at risk.

At the same time, Focused Energy was rapidly transforming its broader IT environment. The company transitioned from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365, while employees continued with tools like OneDrive and Box. Users, policies, applications, and cloud configurations were changing frequently as the business matured.

For IT Director Stuart Gale, synchronization alone was not enough.

“I want backups. I want it done my way. I want to be in control of them,” said Gale. “I don’t want the complexity of backup.”

Focused Energy needed a dedicated data protection platform that could safeguard research without constraining scientists, and give a lean IT organization confidence as the company scaled.

Gale was already familiar with Druva from a previous organization, where he had seen firsthand how quickly data and cloud objects could be recovered when something went wrong. When he joined Focused Energy, Druva was on his “week one” priority list.

The first priority was protecting the company’s hybrid endpoint environment. Roughly 70% of Focused Energy end-user devices are Macs while 30% are PCs. 

Druva allowed the company to protect data created outside its core SaaS and document management platforms without forcing researchers to change the way they work. Scientists and engineers could continue running models locally while Focused Energy maintains a recoverable copy of the resulting data.

“We want our people to be effective,” Gale explained. “If we can run a model on a local device rather than being charged for it in the cloud, then let’s run it on the local device. Druva gives me the comfort that if anything happens to that machine, we can restore that data.”

Focused Energy also deployed Druva across its rapidly growing Microsoft environment. Microsoft 365 and Entra ID protection took just one hour to get up and running.

That gives Gale what he calls a “belt-and-braces” safety net as the team adds users, changes policies, and evolves its Azure environment. Instead of worrying that a configuration change or accidental deletion could become permanent, IT has an independent recovery layer available when needed.

Microsoft Entra ID protection adds another layer of resilience for the identities and configurations underpinning the company’s Microsoft environment.

Just as importantly for a lean IT team, Druva requires little day-to-day attention.

“Druva is a stable piece in the environment that I can put to one side for a second and focus on the other things,” said Gale. “I know it’s doing its job. I’m getting the daily reports. It’s doing everything that I need it to do.”

As Focused Energy expands its Azure footprint, they have peace of mind storing their backup data in AWS with Druva. The simplicity and scalability give the company a foundation for the next stage of its multicloud strategy.

With Druva, the company established a scalable resilience foundation to support its pace of innovation without creating an infrastructure management headache for IT.

• Microsoft protection running in approximately one hour: Focused Energy was able to get Microsoft 365 backups running within roughly 60 minutes, delivering rapid time to value.

• Protected local innovation: Scientists and engineers take advantage of high-performance local compute while Druva protects research data that could otherwise fall outside traditional SaaS and file-syncing systems.

• Less operational overhead: Druva runs quietly in the background, giving Gale and his team confidence in backup and recovery without requiring monitoring or maintenance.

• Greater freedom to change: With recoverable Microsoft cloud data and objects, the IT team can continue evolving policies and configurations as the company grows without treating every change as irreversible.

• A foundation for future growth: Druva protects endpoints, Microsoft 365 and Entra ID data, while providing a scalable foundation as the IT environment and multicloud needs mature.

For Gale, that reliability translates into something especially valuable inside a company moving as quickly as Focused Energy: the ability to focus elsewhere.

“What Druva saves me is my blood pressure a little bit,” he said. “I’ve got something that I don’t really need to check every minute of the day. I know it’s doing what it’s supposed to do.”