BluVault + Watertec
Watertec strengthens data protection strategy with Parablu’s BluVault
About Watertec
Watertec (India) Private Limited, a total bathroom and plumbing solutions provider. Watertec is a market leader in the polymer-based bath fittings space, and also one of India’s fastest-growing end-to-end bathroom solutions providers.
Watertec’s product portfolio shines with a unique ‘H2O promise’ of Health, Hygiene, and Originality. This includes an exclusive range of lifestyle products spanning across bath fittings, sanitaryware, water management systems, rain showers, bathroom accessories, stainless steel products, pipes, and fittings that are ideal for homes, hotels, spas, health clubs, and commercial spaces.
Company Profile
- Industry: Plumbing and Bathroom Solutions Provider
- Location: India
- Parablu Product Used: BluVault
The Challenges
- Less than complete data protection strategy
- Limited IT resources and laborious processes
- The need to keep all backup processes local
- Solution not a future-proof solution
- Questionable data availability
- Insufficient protection against ransomware and other data protection threats
The Solution
- Policy-controlled automated backups
- Industrial-strength encryption during transit and at rest
- On-premise deployment options
- Secure, immutable backups
- Self-service portal
- Centralized management
- Alerts, reports, and audit trails
- Secure file sharing
Benefits of BluVault
Local storage support
Backups and restores efficiencies
Higher data security
Storage savings
“We have always been very particular about the experience we offer to our customers. It reflects in our services, products, and overall approach to anything that can impact them. Data availability and protection directly impact our customers, and we constantly strive to achieve greater confidence in our data protection strategy. BluVault from Parablu has been a great partner in helping us get there. We are extremely happy with the product and the technical support.”
– Bantwal Ramesh Baliga
Chief Executive Officer, Watertec (India) Pvt. Ltd.
The challenge
Watertec offers unique value to its customers that involve cutting-edge designs and new innovative solution ideas. Ensuring that these data along with sensitive production details were protected against data leakages and losses were becoming imperative. They were aiming to achieve this by adopting a solution that could help them reduce data protection and management complexity such as daily maintenance, data restore requests and constant monitoring.
Here were some of Watertec’s key data protection and management challenges
1. Less than complete data protection strategy
Watertec realized that in order to have a robust data protection strategy in place, they needed a mechanism that would add an additional layer of protection to their business data resident on corporate-owned endpoints. Their users dealt with sensitive business data and customer information on a daily basis which demanded a higher level of protection. They were looking at combining their existing tools with a reliable and scalable backup solution to strengthen their data protection approach.
2. Limited IT resources and laborious processes
In the absence of a comprehensive data backup solution, Watertec was depending on manual backups to their local Network-attached storage (NAS) devices. These were manual backups they entrusted their users to make on a daily basis. Their IT team was spending a considerable amount of time and effort tracking and managing data backup performance from the business devices. Watertec realized that this manual process involved a high risk of human errors and longer backup window times that could negatively impact data availability. They needed a solution that would automate the backup process and minimize the resources required to manage the backups as well as storage infrastructure.
3. Keep it Local
Watertec was aware that many businesses today adopt a cloud-first strategy and implement cloud backup solutions. But they wanted a level of control over the data and the backup process which they didn’t feel comfortable a cloud-based solution would provide. They wanted to keep the backup servers and the backup storage on-premises – within the constraints of their management and security parameters. While exploring backup solutions, they crossed off several solution providers who offered and promoted cloud-based backup targets and SaaS-based backup offerings. Watertec was comfortable paying for backup software using a subscription-based pricing model, but not about having the data leave their office premises.
4. Future-proof solution
Watertec is experiencing rapid business growth and a consequent increase in data volumes. This demanded scalable, efficient, and reliable data backup and management processes. They recognized that sensitive data resident on business endpoints with only the current existing application and device-level security checks was not sufficient protection. They needed a solution that could eliminate the workaround and the manual nature of the data protection process. It also needed to be cost-sensitive and minimize storage footprint.
Being a customer-focused company, Watertec wanted to ensure that they provided the best possible solution and experience to their clients. Having the right data at their fingertips whenever required – was critical to support their constant efforts to offer unmatched customer service. They wanted to ensure that they had safe, redundant copies of all data including the most recent data, stored in a secure space to counter any possibilities of data losses, while being easy to recover when required.
6. Protection against ransomware and other data protection threats
When the pandemic forced employees to work from their homes, the world witnessed a rise in malware attacks, particularly ransomware. It was therefore critical that the solution strengthened their existing defenses against ransomware and wiper attacks. Having a safe and reliable backup is one of the best defenses against attacks such as these – and they wanted a solution that could ensure a consistent backup of all endpoint data to their local NAS devices.
Solution
Parablu had helped several customers with similar challenges and had multiple ready references and success stories to share with Watertec, that demonstrated BluVault’s strengths.
1. Policy-controlled Automated Backups
BluVault for Endpoint Backups offered automated, scheduled backups of data from business endpoints to any choice of storage target including on-premise storage. The backup automation and scheduling were policy-controlled and the Watertec team could easily tailor them to support their unique needs for different users and devices. The IT admin could simply login to Parablu’s web-based centralized management portal, author or modify policies, and push them remotely to identified users/devices. These policies gave administrators highly granular control over all aspects of the backup mechanism – like file versioning, backup schedule times, even down to the level of which types of files and folders would be include or excluded.
2. Encryption
Backups created using BluVault are always protected by industrial-strength encryption both during transit and at rest. This reassured the Watertec team that their corporate data is fully encrypted while the data was traveling to the storage target, while resident on the storage, and also while it moved back to authorized devices/users in the event of a data restore. What’s more, BluVault’s Zero-Knowledge Privacy approach meant that Watertec controlled the encryption keys to their backups and could change those keys at any time.
One of the important requirements for Watertec was that the backup process run using their on-premise infrastructure. Parablu was one of the few modern backup offerings which could offer them a broad spectrum of choices. With BluVault, they could keep both the backup software and the data storage target on-premise, while still reaping the cutting-edge benefits touted by many SaaS backup vendors.
4. Secure, immutable backups
Parablu’s BluVault creates a secure container in the storage target where all backed-up copies of endpoint data are safely stored. This ensures that the backed-up data is stored immutable, insulated from any changes on the source systems. For Watertec, this reassured them of data availability in the event of restores. BluVault’s data and storage agnostic backup meant there were no restrictions on file types, file sizes, and file names – no compromises period.
One of the challenges that Watertec was facing is how over-extended their IT team was with manual backup and restore tasks. BluVault’s capability to offer self-service while limiting each user’s privileges to just their data was attractive to the IT team. Any on-demand data restores could be performed by employees themselves using the endpoint agent or via the web-based BluVault console.
Apart from providing end-users a platform for easy data recovery, the BluVault console also offered centralized management and reporting capabilities for the IT and Backup admins. The web-based console could be easily accessed using any device including handheld iOS and Android phones or tablets. Administrators could create new policies and push them out, view backup/restore status, run reports, or review audit logs, all with just a few clicks.
7. Alerts, reports, and audit trails
A comprehensive data protection strategy is not complete without a mechanism of proactive monitoring and flagging of exceptional behavior. Watertec needed visibility into all data backups and restores being performed across all business-owned laptops and desktops. BluVault, through its built-in capabilities of creating alerts with set trigger thresholds, readily downloadable and email-able reports, and auditable time-stamped activities, was able to offer them a smart way to monitor, manage and protect data on business endpoints.
8. Secure file sharing
BluVault also has a secure file sharing feature that allows users to confidentially share data within and outside the organization. This is often a more secure way of sharing as compared to using email or a publicly hosted file transfer service, and certainly easier to use than secure FTP-based mechanisms. Watertec had been concerned about possibilities of data leaks during file sharing especially since their files could contain critical data such as new designs or new innovative solution ideas. They now had the option of allowing secure file sharing, and also limit it to just their important users.
Benefits
In addition to the above, Watertec picked Parablu because it met four specific criteria they had in mind.
1. Local Storage support
Parablu gave Watertec the option to use a cutting-edge, designed-for-the-cloud backup solution but without having to use the cloud. They could purchase BluVault licenses using Parablu’s BYOL (Bring Your Own License) model and deploy it on their infrastructure. They could have their cake and eat it too.
Reliability in the backup process meant that the IT team had to dedicate minimal resources for backup and recovery tasks; more time for the IT team to drive other impactful initiatives.
3. Storage savings
BluVault has several built-in mechanisms to automatically reduce data size – both in-transit and at rest. Features such as ‘incrementals forever’, file & folder filters, software compression, source-side de-duplication, and partial-file transfers all work together to make the data footprint as small as possible. For Watertec, this means optimized use of valuable network bandwidth, as well as NAS storage space.
4. Security
BluVault also ensured that Watertec’s backed-up data is encrypted both at transit as well as at rest – while allowing Watertec to control the encryption process and the keys. The data is also stored inside a secure container insulated from any changes on the endpoint. This helps defend Watertec against threats like ransomware, malicious deletion by insiders and also contributes significantly towards meeting their regulatory compliance goals.
Some of the recent customer success stories
How Tata Sky used Parablu’s BluVault to overcome endpoint data backup and management challenges without any additional investment in backup storage.
RPG Enterprises implemented Parablu’s BluVault and enabled automated backup to their existing OneDrive for Business storage allocations.
Learn how Samta Group streamlined its endpoint data backup process to achieve reliable data protection against insider threats and ensure data availability during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Learn how Cognatic eliminated manual dependencies for endpoint backups and achieved comprehensive data protection using the cloud as a backup vault, all while spending ZERO on data storage.
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