Two Successful Recoveries: How Russell Finex Recovered 100% of Data Using the Druva Data Security Cloud

Russell Finex is an independent manufacturing pioneer with a rich 95-year history. Originally a construction business, the company underwent a successful transition to its current form, operating under an independent governance structure without public shareholders. Today, the organization relies on its IT infrastructure to support global operations stretching across multiple continents.

When Keith Herdman-Grant joined Russell Finex as an IT infrastructure manager, he discovered the company's data protection practices were nearly a decade out of date. The IT team faced severe systemic vulnerabilities:

• High-risk manual processes: Backups relied entirely on custom Robocopy scripts feeding into physical RDX cartridges. Every single day, an apprentice had to manually eject cartridges from the server room and take them home overnight.

• Poor vendor responsiveness & hidden costs: Mainstream backup vendors like Veritas and Datto were slow to respond and offered deceptive pricing structures that excluded critical storage fees, masking the true total cost of ownership (TCO).

• Unscalable appliances: Proposed competitor hardware solutions were costly, inflexible, and fundamentally mismatched for a business rapidly shifting its collaborative workloads into cloud services like SharePoint.

After discovering Druva through a peer’s recommendation, Russell Finex bypassed appliance-heavy architectures in favor of a 100% cloud-native SaaS model. Key elements driving the deployment included:

• The AWS advantage: Russell Finex specifically liked the ability with Druva to store their data in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Given that most of their business data resides in Microsoft applications, the extra layer of protection in the different cloud gives them peace of mind. 

• Built-in administrative safeguards: The Druva platform provides crucial security safeguards that prevent local IT staff or rogue admins from accidentally or maliciously deleting backup sets. This includes built-in policies, controls, user guardrails, and on-demand Druva support.

• Multi-data center regulatory compliance: Druva's ability to protect sprawling geographic footprint allowed the team to simultaneously stream backups to data centers located in the United Kingdom and Mumbai, seamlessly meeting regional compliance and data sovereignty laws.

Transitioning to the Druva Data Security Cloud completely reshaped the manufacturer's operational agility and cyber resilience:

• Elimination of "cartridge roulette": Automation entirely replaced manual physical handling and daily cartridge rotation, freeing staff from administrative overhead and structural risk.

• Rapid virtual machine recovery: The firm gained the ability to flawlessly restore standalone virtual machines in under five minutes.

• Defeating a dual ransomware assault: Russell Finex faced two separate ransomware attacks within 31 days of each other.

  • During the first attack, the team independently recovered using Druva's platform, including the Accelerated Ransomware Recovery feature, with zero data loss.

  • In the second attack, with joint support from Druva and an external security firm, a compromised 2TB server was restored in record time, to fast track full operational recovery.

• Aggregating clean data: The IT team leveraged Druva’s advanced recovery capabilities to build clean target restore points by aggregating the last-known uncorrupted files from multiple snapshot points.

• Responsive support: The firm moved from frustrating vendor experiences to a partnership with Druva including automated alerts and a strong support team. Herdman-Grant recalls: “We’ve never waited more than 15 minutes to be contacted after logging a support ticket with Druva.”