Maple Reinders

Challenge

Maple Reinders, an award-winning construction services provider, saw a tremendous opportunity to simplify its IT infrastructure and reduce high costs by moving to the cloud.

As one of the leading contractors in Canada, Maple Reinders is known for its ground-breaking work in industrial and commercial building and civil environmental construction. The 55-year-old company prides itself on both its deep industry knowledge and its innovative approach to design and construction challenges. Their commitment to innovation is reflected in their long history of adopting leading-edge information technology.

With multiple branch offices across Canada Maple Reinders had built up a significant amount of complex IT infrastructure over the years. Almost a decade ago, Kevin Dreyer, Maple Reinders’ Director of IT, saw this as an opportunity to further incorporate innovation on the IT side of the company. His grand vision was to massively simplify infrastructure, eliminating hardware, and reducing both the management complexity and cost by moving to the cloud. “Geography should not be a limiter for us,” explained Dreyer. “Neither should traditional infrastructure.”

Objectives

As they reduced the complexity of their infrastructure the company became concerned with their inadequate backup and recovery.

As Maple Reinders began moving their workloads to the cloud, they became increasingly concerned about data protection. At the time, they were using Veaam to handle their on-premise backup and recovery. While it seemed adequate, Dreyer was apprehensive about its ability to handle the newer, more aggressive forms of cyber-attacks.

When a major attack took down a peer company for eight weeks, Dreyer’s worst fears were confirmed. He immediately began taking a closer look at how his organization was backing up their data.

Here is what Dreyer was looking to do:
• Phase out expensive infrastructure and eliminate hardware costs
• Ensure the ability to quickly and easily recover data from cyber attacks
• Reduce painful scaling and upgrade issues
• Remove the day-to-day worry and hassle of managing data backup

Solution

Not only did Clumio fit perfectly into their efforts to reduce complexity and cost, it gave them confidence in having immutable backup that was easy to manage.

Fortuitously, while Dreyer was in the midst of investigating his best options for backup, he received a call recommending he look at Clumio’s backup as a service. “At first it was like whatever, another sales call,” admitted Dreyer. But as soon as he saw the demo his attitude shifted dramatically. “For the first time in years, I encountered a product that I was interested in on day one, confident in by week one, and telling everyone about it in the first month,” stated Dreyer.

What excited Dreyer was how differently Clumio approached data protection. “They’ve changed the game with their backup as a service,” stated Dreyer. “Now when it comes to backup, we just say it has to be immutable and offsite.” For Dreyer, knowing that his backup is now being safely handled by Clumio is a huge win. “The other day I was upgrading some servers,” explained Dreyer. “In the past I would be concerned that if something went wrong it would be painful to restore data. Now, I know I have Clumio. Suddenly I have the confidence to pull the trigger. Fear be gone!”

Built for the Cloud

As a backup service built on and for the cloud, Clumio has fit in perfectly with Dreyer’s vision to reduce infrastructure, to phase out hardware costs and to eliminate painful scaling and upgrade issues. Already, Dreyer is looking at reducing his number of servers by at least 25 percent.

Over the next year he plans to take out additional servers that are no longer needed to handle backup. “Right off the bat,” he said, “we’ll be saving hard dollars as well as getting back the time needed for the care and feeding of hardware. And that’s just the start.”

He estimates that even in the short term, he will be saving up to 40 percent in backup costs. Dreyer looks forward to continuing his efforts to consolidate and simplify his data protection as he moves his portal server and SQL workloads to the cloud as well.

Easy to Manage

While so many vendors promise that their solutions will be intuitive and easy to manage, Dreyer’s experience has been that few actually do. In most cases, he observed their technology to be actually overly complex and not easy to use at all. “A lot of sales guys overpromise and under deliver,” he stated. “But that was not the case with Clumio. The Clumio service just works. You bring up the interface and in minutes you’ve got it figured out. You are on your way.”

Proactive Support

Dreyer has also been impressed with Clumio’s proactive support and service. “On day two of the POC, I woke up to see this ticket from Clumio and I knew we didn’t open that ticket,” he shared. “Before my team could even get around to looking at it and checking on the problem, I got another email from Clumio saying they fixed it. Honestly, what more can you ask for?” For Dreyer his day now starts off with a quick check of email from Clumio. “I glance at it for say three seconds,” said Dreyer. “Zero failures, and now my day starts out well!”

Results

As Maple Reinders continues to simplify its infrastructure, Clumio will be there to protect all their workloads and data and do it in a cost effective and efficient way.

The future for data protection at Maple Reinders is bright. For Dreyer, having Clumio on board has not only given him confidence that his data is securely taken care of, it has saved him time and money and it has freed his team up to focus on challenges other than backup. Not only has Clumio reduced by 25 percent the amount of infrastructure his team has to manage, but it has also driven up to 40 percent in backup savings.

“Unplanned work is the killer of productivity,” Dreyer stated. “And Clumio has removed a huge chunk of that.” In the short term, Dreyer has his team focused on cleaning up issues they didn’t have as much time for in the past. The next step will be turning everyone’s attention to more strategic and innovative opportunities for the company.

As Dreyer looks forward, he is also imagining uses for the Clumio service that go beyond traditional backup and recovery. “Potentially I can use Clumio to make a strategic resource pivot without having to plan for or deal with infrastructure,” he explained. “For example, say we need to shift operations from one branch office to another. I can use Clumio to move the necessary data quickly and safely, just like that. Pretty impressive.”