Traditional legacy solutions are usually no longer sufficient for companies to recover data after a disaster.
Downtime is painful, and disaster recovery can take months to get systems back up and running. Organizations need to have an efficient data recovery solution as part of their data backup and business continuity efforts.
Below are five case studies on how companies in different industries use data recovery solutions:
1. Divine Capital Markets
A boutique brokerage firm, Divine capital markets specializes in investment banking, research and trading and has a client portfolio of institutional investors, pension plan sponsors and companies.
“In our industry, a disaster recovery solution is imperative,” said Danielle Hughes, co-founder.
Divine Capital used to rely on hard drives for data backup. However, the data was lost shortly after a disaster at Divine’s premises. Since then, the company has been looking for an efficient solution that combines data recovery with remote backup capabilities. Divine Capital chose KeepItSafe to restore and backup all important information including databases; corporate, historical and personal files; and contact information.
KeepItSafe’s data recovery solution spans Divine’s physical and virtual servers. The solution consists of a dedicated section on-premises, while the other component is deployed off-site in data centers. Offsite DR (Disaster Recovery) helped Divine Capital set up standby failover servers for emergencies. In addition, data recovery was flexible: Divine could either recover information in the form of virtual machines (VMs) or bare metal recovery.
“Backup and restore is one of those services that runs in the background. Right now, our data recovery solution is just insurance for me,” said Hughes. “We have a number of temporary workers, like interns, and with KeepItSafe we can rest assured that we’re protected in case someone accidentally clicks ‘Delete’.”
Industry: fintech
Data Recovery Provider: Keep safe
Results:
- Remote office protection and higher cost efficiency
- Consistent examination of all applications and thus increase in collectability
- Always incremental data collection and block-level snapshots
2. Maple Reinders
Started as a small construction company five decades ago, Maple Reinder stands as a leading name in civil environmental construction. Serving customers across Canada, Maple recognized the need to simplify its IT architecture and adopt a cloud-first approach. Maple had problems protecting its data due to an inadequate recovery system.
“I was concerned about the increasingly aggressive ransomware that wouldn’t stop at your production data, but would kick in the door and reach for backup data as well,” said Kevin Dreyer, director of IT at Maple Reinders.
Maple Reinders has partnered with Clumio to create adequate backup and data recovery infrastructure at office locations. The idea was to minimize upgrade issues and painful scaling, and create automated backups.
Data recovery capabilities are updated externally, so any additional server load can be handled without downtime. The Clumio Snap ensured business recovery and the use of Clumio SecureVault reduced the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) by 50% by destroying excessive Snapshot copies.
“The other day I updated some servers. In the past, I’ve had concerns that it would be painful to recover data if something went wrong,” Dreyer said. “With the backup and recovery system we created, I have the confidence to pull the trigger. Fear gone!”
Industry: construction
Data Recovery Provider: Clumio
Results:
- Up to 25% reduction in server infrastructure costs by phasing out additional hardware
- 40% less backup costs
- 100% data localization in Canada while maintaining domestic and international compliance
3. City of Lodi
California’s City of Lodi is home to over 60,000 residents and is famous for its centuries-old vineyards.
“As a local government, we store an enormous amount of sensitive data and personally identifiable information (PII). We must protect and secure all data of our citizens and employees and ensure that the underlying infrastructure is running 24/7. If our systems go down, city offices could not provide essential services to our citizens for days,” said Benjamin Buecher, Lodi City IT Manager.
A few years ago, the city of Lodi was hit by two consecutive ransomware attacks, costing the government $400,000 and a significant loss of sensitive data, including citizens’ financial information. The CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) service was down for four days and it took officers four weeks to get the system up and running. The slow and manual recovery process resulted in at least a week of data loss.
“Previously, our only option was to perform file-level backups. As a result, during the attack we had to rebuild the data on the machines from scratch instead of simply restoring the machines. The process of recreating all the virtual machines was the most time-consuming aspect,” said Buecher
Rubrik helped the city of Lodi move away from a Windows-based backup system and file-level snapshots, allowing the team to scale their VM backup speeds. The move proved extremely cost-effective for the city administration, which oversaw the entire IT infrastructure. In addition, the data recovery solution connects the IT machines to the Rubrik cloud to prevent and recover data in the event of an attack.
Industry: local government
Data Recovery Provider: category
Results:
- Uncorrupted backups and restores in minutes compared to four weeks ago
- Backup compliance with supranational data policies and regulations
- Simple VM restores
4. FCR media
FCR media has been in the field of digital marketing for over 50 years. The agency offers content marketing, website design, graphics and web ads. Today, FCR has 350 employees and 30,000 customers.
FCR’s IT infrastructure was running on 30 legacy solutions before disaster struck their offices. In response to market trends, FCR then transitioned to Salesforce as its leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) platform. In order to get its systems up and running, FCR needed constant access to its data while recovery was taking place in parallel.
FCR Media hired OwnBackup to create automatic backups and restore corrupted data, metadata and smart alerts.
“A data recovery system is mandatory insurance for every Salesforce customer. I can confidently say that our company is protected from user-related Salesforce data loss,” said Steven Desmet, IT manager at FCR.
Industry: media
Data Recovery Provider: Own backup
Results:
- Data comparison possible on site
- Smart alerts for emergency system shutdowns
- Metadata change in Salesforce
5. Nationwide
nationwide began as an insurance company in 1926 and soon earned Fortune 100 status. The organization offers life, vehicle, home and commercial insurance, annuities, pension plans, mutual funds and specialty healthcare services.
Nationwide suffered frequent VM failures, resulting in massive data loss. Backing up over 21 petabytes (PB) of data, two clouds and three data centers, growing at 10%-15% annually.
“With our legacy backup system, it would have taken months to recover thousands of virtual machines from a large-scale outage. If you’re absent for more than a week, you’re likely jeopardizing your company’s ability to stay in business,” said Rich Alexander of Technology at Nationwide. “We needed a next-generation data management platform that offers ease of use, fast recovery at scale, and strong cyber protection.”
Nationwide used Cohesity SmartFiles to recover unstructured data and scanned documents. The VM and database backup on Cohesity took six months, compared to two years for Nationwide’s previous attempts.
This move strengthened business continuity for Nationwide while reducing costs and creating lean teams. Rather than moving through 90 management interfaces, Nationwide manages all data requests through a single pane of glass. Nationwide’s last data recovery took only three minutes.
“Recovering hundreds of virtual machines from a failed OS patch now takes minutes instead of weeks,” Alexander said. “By simplifying backup and recovery, we’ve avoided adding staff.”
Industry: insurance tech
Data Recovery Provider: cohesion DataProtect and SmartFiles
Results:
- Annual savings increased to $2 million
- Smoother and up to 75% faster migration compared to legacy environments
- Unified backup and recovery platform and object storage
- Data recovery days instead of months
