How Nature’s Path Slashed Backup Costs by 67% and protects Cloud Native Workloads with Druva

Nature's Path Organic Foods, commonly known as Nature's Path, is a Canadian, privately held, family-owned producer of certified organic foods. Originally known for its breakfast cereals, it now has a portfolio of more than 150 products and is the largest independent organic food producer in North America.

Before Druva, Nature’s Path had outsourced its backup management. Over time, this resulted in a fragmented backup environment, with three different solutions that lacked cohesion, centralized management, and visibility to the Nature’s Path team.

"When we were previously outsourcing our backups, we were lacking visibility and ownership of the systems," said Cristian Gomez, Director of IT Operations and Cybersecurity. The team had no way to verify if backups were working or being tested. With the previous vendors, Nature’s Path was only able to retain data for six months, which did not meet their preferred compliance standards.

Seeking a superior backup solution, Nature’s Path looked to move away from its existing and fragmented model toward a modern, fully managed, cloud-native platform. While evaluating hardware-heavy competitors like Datto and Veeam, the team was deterred by high upfront costs and the complexity of managing physical appliances.

Nature’s Path chose Druva to consolidate its hybrid environment—spanning on-premises workloads, as well as their cloud applications like Microsoft 365 and Azure—into a single, unified system. A key differentiator was Druva’s ability to provide an “extra security blanket” from ransomware and cyber threats. By hosting backups in the AWS cloud, Druva ensured backup data remained immutable, air-gapped, and independent from the company's primary Azure infrastructure, driving recovery-readiness.

Beyond standard backups, the organization leveraged Druva for specialized protection of:

• Azure Workloads: Protecting Azure VMs and Azure Blob storage with high-speed recovery capabilities.

• Hybrid Infrastructure: Safeguarding on-premises VMware VMs with a setup process that took only 10 minutes to initiate.

• SaaS Applications: Microsoft 365 data across all applications is stored and now retained for three years, versus the previous six months.

• Advanced Recovery: Adding Accelerated Ransomware Recovery to automate and speed up the restoration process during a cyber event.

• Microsoft Entra ID: Ensuring critical identity infrastructure is secure and recoverable.

By harnessing Druva’s 100% SaaS architecture, Nature's Path eliminated the need for $60,000 in hardware investments and replaced three disconnected tools with one streamlined platform.

By consolidating its backup operations with Druva, Nature’s Path has achieved significant operational and financial milestones:

• Cost Reduction: The organization slashed its annual backup spend by 67% which allowed them to easily add Accelerated Ransomware Recovery for enhanced security.

• Rapid Recovery Times: To the team's surprise, they were able to restore seven terabytes of data in just 45 minutes during testing. Average Azure VM restores now take only eight minutes.

• Operational Efficiency: The team no longer spends their time fixing failed backup jobs or dealing with hardware maintenance. Druva’s 100% SaaS platform has enabled a lean in-house team to manage complex workloads with ease.

• Enhanced Resilience: With Microsoft Entra ID protection and the ability to back up Azure Blob storage, Nature's Path has a unified and predictable strategy for safeguarding its most critical data and identity infrastructure.

• Stronger Compliance: Nature’s Path is now able to retain data for three years with Druva, versus the previous six months with the other three vendors.

Closing out on sharing about Nature’s Path experience, they added: "To be able to execute our backup strategy better and more cost efficiently with Druva is just gold for me," says Livingstone.