Cosmetics giant finds the beauty in Druva over Veeam and saves 30 percent

Rapidly growing AmorePacific Corporation is a powerhouse in the cosmetics industry. One of the world’s ten largest cosmetics companies, the South Korean firm was founded in 1945 and bloomed into a conglomerate that markets 33 health, beauty, and personal care brands in the United States, China, and the Pacific Rim. Innovation fuels its success. As early as 1954, AmorePacific became the first beauty brand to establish a research lab, and Forbes recently placed it on its annual list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies. The enterprise today has approximately 11,000 employees worldwide.

Data is at the core of AmorePacific’s success. At its Hong Kong datacenter alone, the business maintains numerous VMs, baremetal VMware ESXi hypervisors, MS SQL databases, and file servers. AmorePacific relied on Veeam to back up its data to a second data center, but quickly discovered the backup and disaster-recovery architecture was slow, laborious, and costly.

Veeam demands frequent full backups, but each took seven days or more. When a full or incremental backup failed, administrators needed to perform still another full backup. Moreover, restoring data was difficult and very time consuming. AmorePacific was spending endless amounts of time and money managing backup and disaster recovery (DR).

“Our data protection was expensive and unwieldy because we needed substantial storage resources,” recalled Wai Chung, IT backup administrator at AmorePacific’s Hong Kong headquarters. “We had to carefully monitor the backup site and adjust retention to ensure we didn’t exceed capacity.

We struggled to control the capex costs of our data protection systems, which depreciated as soon as we installed them. The costs were even greater because of all the time I spent configuring and managing them. Backups and DR are essential, but they shouldn’t consume too much of IT’s labor and resources.”

AmorePacific needed a more cost-efficient, easier-to-use solution to protect its data at the capacity it required.

AmorePacific bolstered its commitment to innovation by replacing its legacy backup and DR system with Druva, built on AWS. Druva, a cloud-native data protection and management solution, protects and manages enterprise data across endpoint, data center, and cloud workloads— eliminating the burden of unnecessary hardware, capacity planning, and software management.

The firm also deployed Druva to quicken backup and restore speeds. Backup speeds were further accelerated thanks to the block-level deduplication of the Druva platform, which greatly reduced the amount of data that needs to be stored in the cloud. A full backup to the Druva cloud took only three days—less than half the time of the company’s previous Veeam solution. And unlike Veeam, Druva requires only one full backup to be performed.

“We deployed Druva in only half a day,” said Chung. “Druva’s professional services team supported us throughout our implementation, ensuring we had no issues.”

Empowered by Druva, AmorePacific left behind its legacy data protection and embraced a cloud-first strategy, ultimately saving time and overall costs. Druva’s reduced expenses and complexities cut the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the firm’s backup and DR services by up to 30 percent. The enterprise also did away with all capex costs for backups and DR by eliminating the second facility and its duplicate storage systems. Moreover, AmorePacific accelerated full backup by 60 percent over its prior Veeam solution and sped up and simplified restores.

“I save an average of over 30-man hours every month now that we’ve moved away from Veeam’s complex workflow and consolidated our data centers,” said Chung. “Thanks to Druva’s source-side deduplication, we also reduced the volume of data to be backed up by over 50 percent. Compared to our Veeam solution, this very much lessens both the storage capacity and bandwidth needed to safeguard our data.”

Using Druva, AmorePacific leverages the petabytes scale of AWS. The firm no longer monitors its backup storage for overutilization and can retain data for longer periods of time without any capex investments. Additionally, with Druva’s pay-as-you-go pricing, it pays only for storage it needs, resulting in strong cost-efficiencies and predictable backup expenses. Budget uncertainties are now in the past.

For greater data protection, the Druva Cloud Platform provides robust security by encrypting all data in transit between the cosmetics company and AWS, and when at rest.

“With Druva’s service-oriented model, we can easily add new data sources,” concluded Chung. “We have holistic management of backups, reducing IT overhead, and can restore data at the granularity of just a single file. Based on our results, Druva’s backup technology is truly revolutionary. With its speed, scalability, and TCO savings, we now make decisions based on our business objectives rather than the restrictions of our legacy backup solution.”