Founded in 2008, Druva is a fast-growing provider of data protection solutions for the enterprise. The company offers a full suite of data protection and management solutions for enterprise laptops, PCs, smartphones, and tablets. Its flagship product, inSync, is a highly scalable solution designed for backup, secure file sharing, and analytics for the enterprise mobile workforce. Druva has over 1,500 customers and estimates that it protects a million data endpoints across 46 countries. The company is privately held and has offices in the United States, India and the United Kingdom.
To expand its business and appeal to customers who want a cloud-based solution, Druva decided to offer a cloud version of the inSync platform. The company needed a cloud service provider able to meet its business requirements while allowing Druva to stay focused on its core business. As Milind Borate, CTO and co-founder of Druva explains, “Druva is a global enterprise and we needed a service provider with servers in multiple geographic locations. We wanted a platform that would support us as we grew while meeting our stringent requirements for enterprise-level security.”
“We chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) because we were impressed by its technology leadership and reputation as a continuous innovator,” says Borate. Druva runs inSync Cloud on AWS using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for compute, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for storage volume, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for configuration management, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storage.
The inSync Cloud platform provides customers with instant anytime, anywhere access to data using a web browser or mobile device. inSync Cloud runs across multiple Availability Zones in two AWS regions. Figure 1 demonstrates the inSync Cloud on AWS.
Figure 1. inSync Architecture on AWS
After the initial migration, Druva moved away from the Cassandra database that it was using and expanded its cloud stack to include Amazon DynamoDB. “Using Amazon DynamoDB solved the problem that we were having with linear scalability without resorting to designing and building systems ourselves to get desired throughput,” says Borate. “Amazon DynamoDB allows us to focus on application development rather than database maintenance.” Shifting from Cassandra running on Amazon EC2 ephemeral storage to Amazon DynamoDB allowed Druva to decrease Amazon EC2 instances by 75 percent and reduce costs by 30 percent.
“AWS provides services that make our life much easier,” says Borate. “The transition was extremely smooth, everything was automatic, and the experience validated our decision to go with AWS. AWS builds its services with industry best practices, and the architecture is in place to help us design an appropriately secure application environment.”
Druva uses the AWS platform to automated most of its tasks, allowing more time for product planning and development. Using AWS, Druva can perform a weekly code update on the cloud and give its customers immediate access to new features. “Our cloud implementation benefits from the scalability, durability, and flexibility of AWS,” says Borate. “Building inSync Cloud on AWS has meant a faster time to market.”
To learn more about how AWS can help your enterprise application needs, visit our Business Applications details page: http://aws.amazon.com/business-applications/.