How Data Recovery is Used by Nationwide, Divine Capital Markets, FCR Media, City of Lodi, and Maple Reinders: Case Studies

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Traditional legacy solutions are typical no longer enough for companies to recover data after a disaster strikes. 

The downtimes are painful, and disaster recovery can take months to get systems in shape. Companies must have an efficient data recovery solution in place as part of their data backup and business continuity efforts.

See below for five case studies on how companies in various industries are using data recovery solutions:

1. Divine Capital Markets

A boutique brokerage firm, Divine Capital Markets specializes in investment banking, research, and trading, with a client portfolio of institutional investors, pension plan sponsors, and corporations.

“In our industry, it’s mandatory to have a disaster recovery solution,” said Danielle Hughes, the co-founder.

Divine Capital previously relied on hard drives to backup data. However, the data was lost soon after a disaster struck Divine’s premises. Since then, the firm has looked out for an efficient solution that combines data recovery with remote backup capabilities. Divine Capital picked KeepItSafe to recover and backup all its critical information, including databases; company, historic, and personal files; and contact information.

KeepItSafe’s data recovery solution extends across Divine’s physical and virtual servers. The solution is made up of a dedicated on-site section while the other component is deployed off-site at data centers. The off-site DR (disaster recovery) helped Divine Capital to create standby failover servers in case of emergencies. Moreover, data recovery was flexible: Divine could either recover information in the form of virtual machines (VMs) or bare-metal restore.

“Data protection and recovery is one of those services that sit in the background. Right now, our data recovery solution is just insurance for me,” said Hughes. “We do have a number of transient workers, like interns, and having KeepItSafe allows us to rest easy knowing we are protected in the event someone accidentally hits delete.”

Industry: Fintech

Data recovery provider: KeepItSafe

Outcomes:

  • Remote office protection and higher cost-effectiveness
  • Consistent examination of all applications, thus enhancing recoverability
  • Incremental-forever data capture and block-level snapshots

2. Maple Reinders

Started five decades ago as a small-scale construction firm, Maple Reinders stands as a leading name in civil environmental construction. While catering to clients across Canada, Maple realized the need to simplify its IT architecture and adopt a cloud-first approach. In the process, Maple faced troubles protecting its data owing to an insufficient recovery system in place.

“I was concerned about the increasingly aggressive ransomware that would not stop at your production data but would beat down the door and go after backup data as well,” said Kevin Dreyer, director of IT at Maple Reinders.

Maple Reinders partnered with Clumio to create an 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 off-site, so any additional server load can be managed without downtime. The Clumio Snap ensured operational recovery, and the use of Clumio SecureVault lowered TCO (total cost of ownership) by 50% via destroying excessive snapshot copies.

“The other day I was upgrading some servers. In the past, I would be concerned that if something went wrong it would be painful to restore data,” Dreyer. “With the backup and recovery system we created, I have the confidence to pull the trigger. Fear begone!”

Industry: Construction

Data recovery provider: Clumio

Outcomes:

  • Up to 25% reduction in server infrastructure costs by phasing out extra hardware
  • 40% reduction in backup costs
  • 100% data localization in Canada while ensuring national and international compliance

3. City of Lodi

California’s City of Lodi houses over 60,000 citizens and is famous for its century-old vineyards.

“As a local government, we house an enormous amount of sensitive data and personally identifiable information (PII). We must protect and secure all of our citizens and employees’ data as well as ensure the underlying infrastructure is up and running 24/7. If our systems go down, the city departments would be unable to deliver critical services to our citizens for days,” said Benjamin Buecher, IT manager for the City of Lodi.

A few years back, two back-to-back ransomware attacks hit the City of Lodi, costing the government $400,000 and a significant loss of sensitive data, including the financial information of citizens. The CAD (computer-aided dispatch) service couldn’t run for four days, and it took the officers four weeks to get the system up and running. The slow and manual recovery process led to 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. That process of rebuilding all the virtual machines was the most time-consuming aspect,” said Buecher

Rubrik helped the City of Lodi to move away from a Windows-based backup system and file-level snapshots, allowing the team to scale its VM backup speed. The move turned out to be highly cost-effective for the city’s municipal corporation, which overlooked the whole IT infrastructure. Moreover, the data recovery solution connects the IT machines with Rubrik cloud to prevent and restore data during attacks.

Industry: Local government

Data recovery provider: Rubrik

Outcomes:

  • Incorruptible backups and recovery within minutes as compared to four weeks previously
  • Backup adherence with supranational data policies and regulations
  • Simple VM restores

4. FCR Media

FCR Media has been in the digital marketing space for over 50 years now. The agency caters to content marketing, website designing, graphics, and web ads. FCR today is 350 employees and 30,000 customers strong.

FCR’s IT infrastructure was running on 30 legacy solutions before a disaster struck its offices. Seeing the market trends, FCR then shifted to Salesforce as its premier enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) platform. To have its systems up and running, FCR needed access to its data all the time while the recovery happens in parallel.

FCR Media hired OwnBackup to create automatic backups and recover corrupted data, metadata, and smart alerts.

“Having a data recovery system is a must have insurance policy for every Salesforce customer. I can confidently say that our company is protected against user-inflicted Salesforce data loss,” said FCR’s IT manager, Steven Desmet.

Industry: Media

Data recovery provider: OwnBackup

Outcomes:

  • On-site data compare available
  • Smart alerts to shut down systems during emergencies
  • Metadata modification across Salesforce

5. Nationwide 

Nationwide started as an insurance company in 1926 and was accorded Fortune 100 status soon enough. The organization offers life, vehicular, home, and commercial insurance, annuities, retirement plans, mutual funds, and specialty health services.

Nationwide frequently suffered from VM outages, leading to massive data loss. The backup amounts to more than 21 petabytes (PB) of data, two clouds, and three data centers with an annual increment of 10%–15%.

“With our legacy backup system, restoring thousands of virtual machines after a large-scale outage would have taken months. If you’re down more than a week, you’re probably jeopardizing your company’s ability to stay in business,” said Rich Alexander of technology at Nationwide. “We needed a next-gen data management platform offering ease of use, rapid recovery at large scale, and strong cyber protections.”

Nationwide employed Cohesity SmartFiles to restore unstructured data and scanned documents. The VM and database backup to Cohesity took six months, compared to two years in Nationwide’s previous attempts.

This move strengthened business continuity for Nationwide while lowering costs, and creating lean teams. Rather than moving through 90 management interfaces, Nationwide manages all data needs through a single glass pane. The last data recovery took Nationwide only three minutes.

“Recovering hundreds of virtual machines after a failed operating system patch now takes minutes instead of weeks,” said Alexander. “By simplifying backups and restores, we have been saved from having to add staff.”

Industry: InsureTech

Data recovery provider: Cohesity DataProtect and SmartFiles

Outcomes:

  • Annual savings increased up 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
Avya Chaudhary
Avya Chaudhary
Avya Chaudhary is a contributor to Enterprise Storage Forum and Datamation. Previously she was an engineer with a history of experience working with NGOs and civil societies.

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