Item: Druva Data Resiliency Cloud
Rating: 10
Author: Kristopher Mitchelson

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Druva enterprise wide, we needed a centralized backup management system that is easy to use, doesn't impact performance, and simply just works without the user knowing or needing to be involved. It does exactly what it advertises and we've been satisfied with it for years now.

Pros and Cons

Runs in the background with no interference to the user. It simply works.
Having users able to do their own restores if something goes missing and as an IT Department, using Druva to restore data to their new machines during a transition is very quick and easy, also it restores user settings and preferences to the new machine as well with their usage of USMT.
Deduplication on the server side is very effective and nice for storage costs. We have around a 50% deduplication rate meaning we have double the storage available for backups than what we would otherwise have available without dedupe.
User and backend administration is straight forward and simple, there isn't a very complicated or in depth UI on the management console side so it makes getting up and running and ongoing administration fast and simple.
Using Druva as a revisionist tool is also a good use of the product. If you're working on a big document in Word it's a good idea to hit the backup button every few minutes so if you accidentally delete half the document you can just restore back to a 5 minute old version of the document and the amount of loss work and time will be drastically reduced, just another way to use the tool for your benefit.

They are not offering the on premise version of their software anymore so you have to do a cloud based solution with them which for some entities can pose an issue, we are not thrilled about this and may end up leaving Druva due to it although we otherwise wouldn't if they continued to allow us to keep our backed up data locally instead of in their cloud or any cloud based solution
The product is simple so there aren't any hard to use features however the back end database can be sensitive to reboots, if the services are stopped or the server is restarted when back ups are running it more than likely will end in a corrupted database and support will have to intervene to possible fix it or more likely delete and start over, having to have all users run a full backup again and starting over. Also if you have a hardware issue on your SAN for example it isn't resilient by nature.

Return on Investment

Anytime a user does his/her own restore it has saved his or her own time in not having to redo the lost changes made and it doesn't involve IT staff to do a restore for them or to try looking for or recovering the lost/deleted/corrupted file. This savings in money and time spent is apparent, numerous and possibly priceless.
Druva is an affordable product; it's per user cost is acceptable and is affordable for even small businesses

Druva inSync Support for SaaS Apps and Endpoints

We don't use Druva to backup any cloud synced folders as that would be redundant to our local storage since it's already in the cloud.

Druva inSync Data Governance and Compliance

While we appreciate the value the Governance has in terms of tracking data deletion and restores and the audit trails it leaves in the server administration we don't specifically use that feature in our company, but again just by having it built in it's there to use in case we ever needed to address this.

Druva inSync Support for Ransomware, Legalhold and eDiscovery

We did experience a ransomware attack on a client machine and of course we weren't about to pay the required ransom, with Druva we just reimaged the machine and restored their data back to the machine like nothing ever happened, user and system preferences included, such as mapped drives, printers, desktop wallpaper and all other customization the user decided to make on their machine. It's like nothing ever happened when it comes to rebuilds, our users love the rebuild process since we moved to Druva.

Alternatives Considered

Honestly the players in this space 8 years ago were small and that may still be that way today but other than a few products that no longer exist today Druva was the standout

Implementation Rating

Setup and deployment of Druva is super fast, the administration console isn't very involved and you can get clients out to your machines via SCCM or any other deployment method. Once clients are in the admin console, adding new ones, removing them or upgrading them to the newest version is simple as a click.

Key Insights

Do you think Druva Data Resiliency Cloud delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Druva Data Resiliency Cloud's feature set?

Yes

Did Druva Data Resiliency Cloud live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Druva Data Resiliency Cloud go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Druva Data Resiliency Cloud again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

It is appropriate for any situation where you want end user clients to be backed up, you're in control of profiles that are created to dictate what folders are backed up by default, what file extensions or folders are excluded by default and users are able to add their own folders at any time so they're responsible for their own data as well. It's great for rebuilding developer environments quickly as they can add locations where ini, config, and xml files are stored across the hard drive. I frankly don't see a scenario where it's not appropriate to have a backup of data in case of accident or emergency and it should be a part of every company's disaster recovery plan.

Support Rating

Druva's customer support is very willing to help and easy to get a hold of. They will walk through everything very thoroughly and have resolved our issues every time.

Usability

It's very easy to use

Druva is the Enterprise Backup Tool Your Company Needs For Complete Disaster Recovery and Hardware Migration

Overall Satisfaction with Druva inSync