Reliable Endpoint Backups – The missing piece in one of the leading real estate service providers’ data protection puzzle

Customer description

The challenge

As a fast-growing organization with a clear focus on automating their real estate services, they wanted to eliminate gaps in their existing data protection strategy, enhance protection for all business data, and align themselves with regulatory mandates such as GDPR.

The IT team had several challenges on their hands.

1. Manual backup operations

In the absence of an automated backup process, this real estate service company depended on a time-consuming and error-prone manual backup strategy. The existing backup and restore mechanism proved to be unreliable, complex to track, and posed a significant threat to the business as it constantly needed IT and end-user intervention. With a business that was witnessing exponential data growth, they realized they needed to move quickly to an enterprise-class backup solution.

2. High Complexity

With an ever-increasing amount of business data being generated in different forms and formats across different business groups, this company needed a unified solution to securely back up and protect all its data. The wide range of data types being generated across a spectrum of different business endpoints (laptops, desktops, Macbooks), required a flexible and easy-to-use backup system that would minimize disruption to operations and support future growth. They realized that a modern data backup could dramatically reduce their daily backup struggles and significantly reduce the time taken for data recovery operations.

3. Regulatory Compliance

As this real estate service company witnessed rapid growth in their customer base across the globe, they became acutely aware of the need to ensure that their data protection strategy included measures to align with data governance and regulatory compliances such as GDPR. They needed to implement a robust data protection solution to strengthen the protection of sensitive information through comprehensive backups and have quick recovery options in case of data loss due to cyberattacks or natural disasters.

4. Limited visibility

With a practice of manual backups in place, this real estate service company did not have a unified platform that offered complete visibility to backup/restore workloads across their operational locations. With no centralized management to secure, monitor, and manage backups, the IT team was not confident about the extent of data protection coverage and consequently, about their capability to deal with data losses that might occur due to cyberattacks, system failures, or natural disasters. This growing concern made it imperative for them to adopt a unified data backup solution that could better protect their business data and provide consolidated visibility of all activities through a centralized platform.  

5. Need for enhanced protection against ransomware attacks 

With the increased frequency of social engineering attacks and heightened risk of ransomware, this growing company realized that they had to improve their business data protection measures, especially for data on business endpoints like laptops and desktops. They needed to shore up their existing strategy and consider a reliable and secure backup solution that could ensure safe, secondary copies of data for quick recovery in the event of a ransomware attack.

6. Insider threats and Malicious Deletion

Apart from the fear of ransomware, this real estate service company was also acutely aware of the dangers that insiders may pose in the form of malicious deletion of data.  They understood that to complete their data protection strategy, they needed a modern and agile backup solution that ensured a defense not only from external risks like ransomware but also from insider threats.

The Solution

Considering the data protection challenges and goals of this real estate services company, Parablu suggested it’s signature endpoint backup solution – BluVault – Endpoint Backup to OneDrive.

BluVault’s ability to automate backup processes, along with a host of other security and privacy features offered them the much-needed relief from time-consuming and inefficient manual efforts around backups while providing reliable data protection. The best part was that BluVault allowed them to use their existing OneDrive for Business storage allocations as backup storage targets.

Here are a few key reasons why BluVault was their ultimate choice to overcome their data protection challenges.

1. Automated backups

What this estate service company sorely needed was to eliminate all manual efforts around the backing up of endpoints.  BluVault’s capability to establish secure and automated backups from all business endpoints like laptops, desktops, and Macbooks would help them remove all dependencies on end-users, and dramatically reduce IT time spent on manual backups.

2. Zero storage cost

Moving to an automated cloud-based backup usually comes with extra investment in storage infrastructure and related services. But Parablu could offer them all the benefits of a modern enterprise-grade backup solution without having to spend a penny on target storage.  BluVault’s patented technology integration with Microsoft 365 allows enterprises to use their existing OneDrive for Business storage as a backup vault. And this would help the company considerably reduce the overall cost of adopting a cloud-based backup solution while also increasing the Return on Investment (ROI) from their Microsoft 365 subscription.

3. Regulatory Compliance

Almost all regulations require businesses to protect the data they have.  So, automated and reliable backups are an essential stepping-stone to compliance. BluVault could clearly help in reaching its compliance goals with GDPR and other regulations.

4. A single pane of glass

A backup strategy, unless closely monitored and managed, can be ineffective. Efficient monitoring during backups and restores can help enterprises identify gaps and anomalies that can impact data protection.  And the sooner such gaps and anomalies are detected, the quicker the business can react to take proactive steps to mitigate.  BluVault’s centralized management console would help this real estate service company get 360-degree visibility on their backup & restore activities and let them make policy changes anytime they required.

5. Defense against Ransomware with comprehensive backups

Data backups are proven to be perhaps the best defense against a ransomware attack.  Having a safe alternate copy of all critical data means that the business can control its own destiny, and not have to negotiate with an attacker. BluVault backups stored in a secure storage container, insulated by user accounts, data encrypted in transit, and at rest, had the ability to let this organization be confident in dealing with potential ransomware attacks.

6. Data protection against insider threats

Threats to data that originate within the organization can be sometimes more damaging than external threats. An insider with privileged or even elevated access to systems has the potential to cause harm either inadvertently or maliciously.   A backup copy that can ensure an isolated and immutable copy of data that is inaccessible to end-users is an essential way to protect data from insider attacks.  With BluVault, they could effectively minimize data losses due to insider threats.

7. Policy-based backups for unique protection needs

Every organization is different and has varying data protection needs.  What they wish to backup, how often, how many versions of data they wish to retain, etc. Answers to questions like backing up personal user data or allowing administrators to view and restore user data – can all vary depending on the organization and the culture.

BluVault offered the company the ability to configure backup and recovery processes differently for different sets of users or groups. These simple policy-based settings, combined with a  reliable and automated backup process – would give expression to their data protection strategy.   As they grew as a business and add more employees, the range of policies that BluVault offered would ensure a flexible, scalable, and robust execution of their backup strategy.

The Benefits

Moving to a cloud-hosted backup using BluVault offered this real-estate service company many of the above benefits and also a new set of advantages.

1. Backup as a Service (BaaS)

With BuVault, this customer moved from a manual, on-premises backup model to a modern, cloud-hosted backup service that Parablu provided.  Parablu’s Backup as a Service (BaaS) offering meant that company didn’t have to implement any on-premise infrastructure. BluVault’s back-end systems were hosted in the cloud and only needed to deploy the BluVault endpoint agent software to their business systems. This meant backups can be performed anywhere at any time – no matter where the users were located.

2. Zero storage costs 

With BluVault’s unique ability to use their existing OneDrive for Business storage allocations as backup vaults, the customer did not have to invest in additional storage at all. With most backup solutions, storage costs end up being as high as 70% of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) over a 3-5 year period.  And by using BluVault, this organization essentially brought this cost down to zero.

3. Built-in elasticity

Using Parablu’s BaaS, this real estate service company now has a fully elastic solution. They can grow their user base as they please without having to plan for infrastructure. BluVault in the cloud expands elastically based on the workload, and storage for new user backups is automatically provisioned because every new user gets their own OneDrive for Business account.  This increased agility is allowing them to provision users at will.

4. Centralized visibility

With centralized monitoring and management of data protection activity under a single pane of glass, this customer has considerably improved their operational efficiency. BluVault’s intuitive dashboard, ready reports, audit logs, and real-time status updates have made administration easier and efficient.

5. Regulation, Ransomware, and Insider Threats

With BluVault, this real estate service company now has a secure, geographically separated, user-insulated, immutable copy of their data backups. They now feel confident of being able to satisfy regulatory needs, while also having a reliable defense against potential ransomware and insider attacks.

8. Flexible licensing model with world-class support

BluVault came with uncomplicated user-based, subscription licensing that offered support for up to 3 devices per license. This makes it simpler for them to plan for future growth and easily predict the company’s upcoming operational expenses.

Apart from relying on BluVault’s automated backups, they also rely on Parablu’s trusted technical support team. Parablu’s technical support team has stayed with the organization through the entire process – right from deployment, until their completed implementation and rollout.

What customer says