Mike Leone, Sr. Network Engineer at Protected Trust, talks about building a reliable, secure managed service business with Rubrik (and the single bane of his existence).
Tell me about what you do at Protected Trust.
I’ve been at Protected Trust for the last 6 years. As a network engineer and system architect, I wear multiple hats, dealing with networks, servers, and systems. Protected Trust started out as an Exchange hosting company for high-security level clients and over the years has evolved into a full-service managed services shop (simple email encryption, Exchange hosting, secure cloud, and disaster recovery). Our job is to not only make IT easy for our users, but also make IT secure. Our clients don’t need to see the data center unless they want to.
What led you to Rubrik?
Protected Trust offers backups as part of its DR-as-a-Service offering. It’s been a challenge trying to find an effective solution to execute on our vision of protecting the full data lifecycle in a secure and reliable fashion. After data creation by our clients, it’s our job to process, archive, and dispose of it properly.
We’ve tried multiple backup solutions and found them to be fairly complicated. As you need more capabilities, there are more things to assemble – additional plug-ins, agents, and hardware. If they fail, it would become an operational nightmare for us. The inability to restore, whether it’s testing or for recovery, is the kind of scenario that keeps me up at night. I hadn’t been comfortable with any one backup solution until I discovered Rubrik. After experiencing a failed backup, which could have cost us several thousand dollars of damage, we were intrigued by Rubrik’s new converged approach.
What challenges have you solved with Rubrik?
We were struggling with daily management complexity, recovery, and operational complexity in training our Tier 1 support to help resolve client issues.
I was one of several folks dedicating 2-3 hours of my day to managing backup jobs and manually checking snapshots. Rubrik offers us the ability to manage backup policies rather than jobs. It’s easy to select VMs, pair them with policies, and be done with it. Using Rubrik has allowed me to reduce that to a once-a-week process.
Our RTO, which used to take a full business day, now takes minutes with the ability to mount our files directly on Rubrik. The ability to instantly search your data in a Google-like fashion means that our restores take as long as search. With Rubrik, I can quickly complete recovery testing. I select a VM, restore the VM by doing a live mount on Rubrik, log into the VM to check it’s working, and shut it down.
With our previous backup solutions, it was difficult for any Tier 1 support to understand how to troubleshoot. The simplicity of Rubrik increases the effectiveness of our support staff. If a client calls in and needs to restore a file, it’s easy to find the file or VM and restore it quickly. That means we are able to solve client issues faster and deliver instant RTOs, helping us improve client satisfaction overall.
What plans do you have for Rubrik to help evolve your managed service offerings?
We’re building a business model with multi-tenant clients and plan to offer Backup-as-a-Service based on SLA policies – the frequency at which you want to backup, where you want to store your backups and for what duration. We’ll be offering public cloud storage, in addition to object storage at Protected Trust, for secure data archival too. Rubrik’s ability to securely orchestrate data across private and public cloud for long-term data retention helps us service our clients operating in heavily regulated industries with stringent security standards like HIPAA.
How has Rubrik improved your life?
My least favorite part of the job is writing up documentation and doing backups. With Rubrik in place, documentation is now the only remaining pain.
Download the case study: Protected Trust Delivers Reliable Backup-as-a-Service with Rubrik. Watch the 2-minute video.