AWS Control Tower vs. Druva Data Resiliency Cloud

We were wanting to prove the concept of a low touch process for quickly spinning up boilerplate AWS environments. We were able to get started quickly and to ensure that the AWS Well-Architected Framework principles were followed - at least upfront - however, we found that for our use case and expertise level it ultimately wasn't a fit. We have the skills on our team to manage more of this on our own. My recommendation would be contingent on what skills are already available on your team: if you can "do it yourself" you might as well so that you don't pay for resources you don't need and you have finer grain control over what's created.

Incentivized

Druva Data Resiliency Cloud is an easy to use product that "just works'. To me it is a configure and forget suite of products. I think it is well suited for the protection of virtual workloads on VMWare, Hyper-V and AHV. In addition, to File servers and NAS appliances. In my opinion, it is not the best product for physical workloads, as image based backups are not supported.

• Easily create new AWS accounts.
• Easily secure and manage AWS accounts.
• Landing zone with SSO is a huge win for larger teams.

Incentivized

• We like the option of downloading backed up files both individually and as a group.
• The ransomware protection is a security feature that puts our minds at ease when it comes to the safety of our data.
• The Customer Success team does frequent reach outs and technical health checks.

• The AWS SSO GUI is not very intuitive and determining how to apply policies to users without creating redundant logins has been a challenge.
• The default guardrails do not fully encompass all the security checks that we needed.
• There does not appear to be any way to control roles at the IAM level from the control tower account through the GUI.
• Some features on AWS accounts still require logging into the individual account with the root user and cannot be done from AWS Control Tower.

Incentivized

• Advanced Ransomware Recovery doesn't work for all Druva offerings, that would be a great feature to have.
• The archiving feature could also offer more price flexibility.
• Seating up the initial configurations can be a little tedious due to the length of the documentation involved.

The product was easy to deploy and has been easy to manage. The current pricing model is also acceptable. With all of this combined, it just makes sense to renew our subscription to the product. The only thing that may change this is if there is a product or service that we need that either they do not function with or if they do not offer

Incentivized

There is no way to easily close an AWS account whether it was created manually or via the AWS Control Tower. It takes too many steps to close it vs to provision a new AWS account

Incentivized

Usability is really high on my list when it comes to software/applications. As with all new technologies, there is a bit of a learning curve, but things are relatively easy to find. Occasionally you have to do a few extra clicks, but for the most part, it's quite user friendly and intuitive. You don't have to go a dozen levels deep to find what you're looking for - or at least the surface level issue.

Incentivized

Like any service, there are scheduled maintenance periods and unscheduled outages, however outages have been very limited and fortunately have not had any impact on our environment.

Incentivized

Page response in the admin center is acceptable- rarely are we waiting for data to load. Backup speeds seem fine, and restore speeds are OK considering it's likely pulling data from cold storage. It often takes 30-60 seconds for the restore to begin transferring files, but speeds are acceptable thereafter

Incentivized

I can't downvote this facet on account of my never having to call upon Druva's Tech Support. Self-help is always my first port of call and the documentation provided by Druva has allowed me to proceed to a point where I can confidently use the system. Even without support, I trust the system implicitly. That said, I'm pretty sure if and when I need it, it'll be awesome.

Incentivized

They are very well knowledgeable. They conducted a two day training session and they explained each and everything.

As an administrator, if I had a user who needed additional training, it was available. As an Administrator, the product was so easy I didn't need it

Incentivized

Implementation from cloud ranger to Druva Data Resiliency Cloud platform was a seamless integration experience to upgrade the policies and license for continual backup/recovery support. This may be one of the best "set it and forget it" apps for backup solutions, that also allow notifications for failures etc...

Incentivized

Using AWS Systems Manager and other slightly lower level components has been helpful for us to manage parts of our AWS presence at a more granular level than AWS Control Tower was designed for. It's not at all an apples-to-apples comparison as they solve different use cases, but for us, the use case associated with AWS Systems Manager was a better fit for our specific needs and skillsets. We did not need everything that AWS Control Tower was doing for us.

Incentivized

Commvault was just as expensive, but not very intuitive. OneDrive was fine for basic backups but would have been difficult to implement firmwide in a robust solution that protected all of our production data. Neither product was a smooth end-user experience, and it was unclear how reliable the backup and restore times would be.

Across both Insync and Phoenix- it is almost too easy to add more data. Our Marketing team recently added a bunch of data from AWS glacier to Druva Data Resiliency Cloud warm storage, and the experience has been nothing short of excellent; we can pull these files off much quicker and effectively now compared to before.

• Less time manually deploying accounts which was error prone.
• Central logging allowed us to have 1 place to view logs.

Incentivized

• Using Druva has simplified greatly the backup process. Once fully configured to your business needs, Druva provides a fast amount of backups.
• Druva has saved a lot of time for the IT team. Usually time is wasted by staff members searching for a missing email. Now, they reach out to us or use their own Druva account to locate a missing email quickly and easily.

Incentivized