Frogslayer

Overview

Frogslayer not only builds custom sfotware for its clients, it also hosts and manages it. A key part of their service is the ability to reliably back up workloads and recovery data when necessary.

The Company’s Goal

Like many firms, Frogslayer had chosen to create their own backup scripts for AWS and, while this may have worked in the past, it was becoming increasingly unwieldy and difficult to manage as the company grew.

The Aha Moment

As Frogslayer looked for alternative approaches to data protection, they became frustrated by the lack of innovation. The majority of solutions were snapshot managers that forced Frogslayer to choose between low cost and high risk or high cost and low risk.

The Outcome

Then they discovered Clumio and found a solution that was built on and for the cloud. Clumio’s unique approach provided enhanced security, a balance of full features and easy management, and significant cost and time savings.

Onward and Upward

Clumio allowed Frogslayer to leave the manual, repetitive and heavy process of build-your-own backup behind. With Clumio they had the future of data protection.

The Business Challenge— Supporting a Growing, Dynamic Client Base

Frogslayer, a custom product development and commercialization firm, helps growing companies leverage the cloud as they digitally transform their business. “We not only design custom software for our clients, we host and manage the services as well,” explained Brian Cahill, Director of Technology and DevOps for Frogslayer. “We offer them a solution in which they don’t have to worry about managing the software. From backup to security to monitoring, we take care of it all for them.”

Taking care of it all though was becoming increasingly challenging for Cahill and his team as Frogslayer expanded and added new clients. “The stuff that keeps me up at night is just making sure we’ve got our business continuity and disaster recovery plans in place,” stated Cahill. “As our client base grows, how do we make sure that we’re protecting everyone’s data? How do we guarantee their backups are reliable and that they can retrieve data when necessary?”

As Frogslayer’s clients accelerate their move to the cloud, they have been increasingly concerned about security, demanding confident answers for questions about encryption, key management, and ransomware protection. Driven in part by industry regulations and standards such as ISO 27001, NIST, HIPAA, and CCPA, these security concerns have only grown. “Are we ready for anything that hits us,” Cahill asked himself in response. “Are we focused enough on properly securing our cloud backups?”

The Technical Problem—Can’t Do it Alone Anymore

Like many firms, Frogslayer had chosen to create their own backup scripts for AWS, causing an ever-increasing challenge. While it may have worked in the beginning, the process was becoming painful, requiring new scripts for every upgrade of cloud APIs, and it began taking up more and more of their time. The opportunity for Frogslayer was to find a way to simplify the complexity of data protection and alleviate the strain of creating their own homegrown backup scripts.

The opportunity for Frogslayer was to find a way to simplify the complexity of data protection and alleviate the strain of creating their own homegrown backup scripts. “With our increased use of AWS services as well as the need to use other clouds such as Microsoft Azure, we realized our code footprint was getting too big and the effort to upgrade the scripts was getting unmanageable,” Cahill said. Simply put, Frogslayer could not sustain the data protection model it had in place. They had hit the wall. Cahill knew that it was too complex and ultimately too expensive to maintain a home-grown approach.

Looking for an Answer—And Finding Nothing

As the firm embarked on its search for a new data protection solution, the focus was on finding a service that would provide the robust backup and recovery needed for both Frogslayer and its clients, while significantly simplifying the management of the overall system. Cahill wanted a solution that did more than he was able to do on his own and would free up the increasingly significant amount of time he and his team had been spending on the process.

Unfortunately, as Frogslayer’s search for a solution progressed, they found that most data protection vendors were simply selling what Cahill was already doing and without any real innovation. Up to this point, the search was little more than frustrating. “The majority of the solutions that we were looking at were basically AWS snapshot managers. They ran mostly the same APIs I was running,” Cahill said. “I would just be paying somebody else to do it. And not do it that well.”

The problem with snapshot managers was they forced Cahill to choose between low cost and high risk or high cost and low risk. While they provide a mechanism to back data up, their approach is cumbersome and doesn’t provide adequate security for stored data. Moreover, snapshot managers don’t easily address data recovery. Their data retention is expensive and their restores are complex and tedious. Instead of solving Frogslayer’s data protection issues, snapshot managers only introduced new ones.

Clumio—Finally, Something Distinctive

That all changed when Cahill discovered Clumio. “Clumio is doing it differently,” Cahill observed. “They are doing something nobody else is doing.” Clumio’s architecture, which is built on and for the cloud, impressed Cahill from the start. Clumio’s unique ability to handle copying, deduplication and data compression, and store and secure the data in a separate and protected location was a major factor in his decision to go with their service.

The Business Benefits—No Tradeoffs

With Clumio now managing his backup and recovery, Cahill no longer has to worry about making tough tradeoffs. He can have high performance data protection without unreasonable costs or significant demands on his team. He can scale to meet the needs of his clients and he can do it in a way that ensures their data has the best possible protection.

Enhanced Security

In addition to the ever-increasing threat from ransomware attacks, organizations are susceptible to unintentional deletion of backups. Clumio’s air gap solution provides a layer of protection to prevent both malignant attacks and innocent mistakes from having catastrophic impacts. “A critical selling point was the air gap,” Cahill said. “Unlike snapshot managers, the stored data is not in danger if the production account is compromised.”

There’s a further benefit awaiting Frogslayer’s customers should they have the need. It’s a big step up to be able to recover quickly and easily in the case of a ransomware attack. When Frogslayer’s customers are threatened, they can see further benefits from fast, simple recoveries. If they turn on Clumio’s rolling backup for their RDS databases, restores are not only very fast, they’re easy to execute. At the critical point of data recovery, no one needs slow and complicated.

Ease of Management

Clumio didn’t just offer Frogslayer a full featured solution, but made it simple to administer, with a very concise and easy-to-click-through user interface. “The UI is self-documented. There’s not a lot hidden, so I don’t have to document how to do a backup,” Cahill said. And it only took a one-hour phone call for the company to get up and running on the Clumio service. “We just took it and ran with it,” he added. “Clumio is very intuitive.”

Exceptional Support.

Cahill also appreciates Clumio’s proactive support to know that things are managed and running smoothly. Rather than just sending daily status emails as some vendors do, Clumio proactively and immediately logs a ticket and notifies Frogslayer if something in the system isn’t right. Trusting that element of the Clumio service now frees up even more of Cahill’s time. “We’re doing our weekly or monthly log in and look, but we know that Clumio’s covering that real time,” Cahill said. “We don’t always even read the emails because Clumio catches the issues and lets us know that they’re there.”

Cost Effectiveness

Internally, Frogslayer saw the biggest cost savings in being able to free up the hours Cahill’s team had been spending working on the scripts and backups. They no longer have to spend hours writing and updating scripts to back up client data. “Backups are always a big task for an IT department,” Cahill explained. “And now we’re saving a lot of time on a problem that was consuming so much of it before.” The Clumio service allows Cahill to spend more of his time focusing on the actual business of providing service to Frogslayer’s clients.

In terms of real dollars, Frogslayer was able to pass savings on to its clients while significantly improving their data protection. “The biggest selling point was when we were able to say, ‘We upgraded you and your costs went down,’” Cahill said. “A number of our clients got discounts because we are able to do it a lot more efficiently.”

Ready for the Future

Prior to Clumio, Frogslayer was frustrated by the limited options vendors were offering, seeing them as essentially a copy of the manual, repetitive and heavy process that Cahill was already doing. With Clumio, Cahill found a solution that matched what he saw as the future of data protection. “I’ve been doing backups for my whole career, and Clumio is how I would have built it if I had the time,” Cahill said. “Each hurdle that I had hit with a script, Clumio either had a solution in place or was already working on one.”