Brown Family Wine Group Ensures Critical Production Continuity with Rubrik
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CHALLENGES
Before Rubrik, Brown Family Wine Group relied on slow, tape-based backups and limited regional bandwidth that hindered cloud backups and slowed disaster recovery for its premium winemaking and distribution operations. The IT team often had only 15–25 Mbps available, forcing them to archive to tape and physically transport media to a disaster recovery (DR) site three hours away. As a result, DR could take 24-48 hours, and because the process was so resource‑intensive, they could only test twice a year. Key challenges included:
1
Time‑consuming, fragile tape-based backups dependent on physical transport
2
DR times of 24-48 hours with infrequent testing and low confidence in recovery
3
Limited visibility into anomalies and sensitive data exposure across core business systems
OUTCOMES
Partnering with Rubrik helped Brown Family Wine Group achieve:
Reduced recovery time 99% from up to 48 hours to ~30 minutes: Enabled rapid restoration of critical systems while minimising operational risk
Saved 30% in TCO: Centralised protection for all mission‑critical data, including ERP, financials, customer, distribution, and HR systems
Increased disaster recovery testing frequency from twice a year to monthly: Strengthened continuous readiness and reduced operational risk
Preserved brand trust: Delivered a seamless consumer and partner experience by minimising disruption
Enhanced board confidence in operational readiness: Reinforced trust through transparent resilience metrics and tangible recovery playbooks
When Recovery Became a Business Risk
Brown Family Wine Group operates in a market where reliability is a key differentiator, with large distributors dependent on timely, consistent deliveries. Any system constraints were particularly risky during vintage, the critical grape harvest season when systems must support intake planning, data tracking, customer orders, and distribution. Slow recovery meant Brown Family Wine Group could miss delivery windows, resulting in empty shelves and risking both revenue and industry reputation. Head of Innovation & Insights, Emma Brown, recognised that a disaster recovery model based on tapes, long drive times, and multi‑day recovery windows no longer met the business’s expectations.
As systems and data volumes grew, the legacy approach created a widening gap between operational needs and IT capabilities. Brown Family Wine Group needed a DR strategy that could keep critical services online or bring them back in minutes, not days, while providing the assurance that data was both recoverable and secure.
Fast, Orchestrated Recovery
Brown Family Wine Group implemented Rubrik in 2018, replacing Symantec and Veeam with a unified platform for backup, replication, and orchestrated recovery. Two Rubrik appliances now manage local backup and efficient replication to the DR site, eliminating tape and the manual processes that had previously slowed response. Disaster recovery times dramatically improved, dropping from 24-48 hours to approximately 30 minutes. DR testing is now a standard, monthly operating practice.
This change transformed DR from a high‑effort, low‑frequency exercise into a predictable capability embedded in Brown Family Wine Group’s resilience strategy. As a result, both IT and business stakeholders now have greater confidence that critical systems can be restored quickly, even during peak periods like vintage, which preserves both revenue and customer commitments.
Defense in Depth and Cloud Vault
Rubrik also provided Brown Family Wine Group with deeper visibility and stronger security controls. Orchestrated Recovery offers structured runbooks for failover and recovery, while Anomaly Detection pinpoints unusual activity, such as mass deletions or modifications in SharePoint and virtual machines. Sensitive data capabilities identified previously unknown regulated personal data in collaboration systems that existing DLP tools had missed, significantly bolstering compliance and reducing risk.
To further harden resilience, Brown Family Wine Group is migrating from AWS backups to Rubrik Cloud Vault, gaining more immutable, isolated copies and standardising the backup and cyber recovery toolset. This consolidation simplifies operations, improves support, and strengthens the overall security posture across the organisation.
"Rubrik gave us visibility we did not have before. The data anomaly detection and sensitive data discovery provide multiple layers of protection. It's defense in depth—it's not just about one tool; it's about multiple layers of protection working together to keep our data secure."
- Emma Brown