Coldwell Banker Prime Properties Lands Premier Data Protection Real Estate With Druva

Coldwell Banker Prime Properties (CBPP) offers a full line of services to guide the real estate process from beginning to end. With 30+ offices and more than 700 agents throughout Upstate New York, they’re the largest Coldwell Banker real estate affiliate in New York State and one of the largest in the country.

Ten years ago, CBPP wanted to not only back up end-user data, but they wanted an assurance that all of that data could be restored within very tight RTO and RPO requirements. Gabe DiSarro, CIO for CBPP, remembers looking to improve on the backup systems they had in place at that time.

DiSarro recalls that they were “hopping from one technology to another." Over the years they deployed everything from tape manually rotated to off-site storage facilities to on-prem BDR servers uploading to co-located data storage. The solutions used included Veeam, ShadowProtect, and even CrashPlan. 

However, to get the data protection management system they wanted as new technologies emerged, they found themselves “rolling their own” solution. For instance, using Veeam and ShadowProtect to back up to local NAS storage, synchronized to Amazon S3, and then archiving to Amazon Glacier. They imaged endpoints to local NAS appliances before using the NAS software to mirror the backups to off-site disaster recovery servers. As DiSarro put it, “Meeting our various business requirements for data recovery while ensuring we were always utilizing the best technologies available, created a maintenance and management environment that was untenable. We were always either in the design or deployment phase of the next technology."

DiSarro recalled that previously, testing and managing backups for IT took up a significant portion of his time. He still remembers the details of the work: “From the bad old days of tape for accounting systems that needed to be reliably archived off-site, labeling, rotating, transporting to a secure facility, then eventually co-location and various cloud alternatives. It was a laborious and risky part of what IT did."

DiSarro didn’t want to use a second-tier solution. He knew CBPP was a growing company that needed a scalable enterprise solution. As DiSarro put it, “I was looking for a backup and data protection solution that the company was not going to outgrow."

His reasoning was that if he picked a solution that exactly fit the company as it was at that moment, there would always be an amount of effort, danger, and risk as the company grew. He explained that when you start to work with a new product, “Your knowledge is really limited. There are all sorts of holes. You don’t know what you don’t know, and that creates a danger." That’s why DiSarro likes living with products that they can mature alongside over long timeframes.

The team at CBPP is very lean — only three people manage the infrastructure. So, it was important to DiSarro to find a partner vendor who was “at the top of their game and are experts in what they do” since they would essentially act as another team member.

700 independent real estate agents and the 100 employees that support them are DiSarro’s customers. Every agent is an independent contractor, essentially a CEO of their own company. DiSarro’s IT team keeps in mind that just one Excel file could be essential to someone’s function and productivity. Once the company adopted Microsoft 365, DiSarro needed to ensure that his team could recover that one Excel file or even entire laptops, restored as closely as possible to the failure point not only in terms of the data, but the configuration as well.

DiSarro explains that occasionally the team must help restore crucial documents important to closing on a home. As DiSarro puts it, “In our company, IT’s charge is not just to do IT stuff. It is to impress all of our customers, both the realtors and actual clients who are buying and selling."

CBPP adopted Druva ten years ago to protect data on employees’ laptops. When they made the move to Microsoft 365, they adopted Druva for Microsoft 365 which now handles everything from mailboxes to SharePoint sites and Teams. DiSarro shared, “Druva gives one ‘pane-of-glass’ for our entire backup and recovery environment.”

DiSarro recalled searching for the best solution, “When evaluating data protection options, it was clear Druva was thinking about the process a little differently than everybody else was. It was more professional, more technically oriented, but easy to deploy and manage." 

It is so easy to use that to migrate an employee from an old laptop to a new one, they only need to install the Druva client on the new machine, restore the old laptop’s backup, and decommission the old laptop. Since they are such a small team, DiSarro appreciates a solution that gives them the least amount of work to do but still knows that the data and configuration are always there.

One of DiSarro’s criteria for a new data protection solution was to find something that the company wouldn’t outgrow. He knew Druva was going to check that box when CBPP became an early adopter of Druva’s Microsoft 365 backup solution. He shared, “There was a tiny period that I had to gap, and then Druva saw the writing on the wall and started to support that platform.” He knew he had found the side-by-side growth he was looking for in a data protection solution.

Druva has also supported CBPP’s explosive growth. DiSarro’s team now supports double the offices (30+) and end users (800+) than they did ten years ago, so the data requirements have skyrocketed. DiSarro also led the company from being completely on-premises to being a fully cloud-hosted company.

The CBPP team loves the Druva solution and partnership. Since deployment, they haven’t had a problem and contact support less than one time per year on average. DiSarro has confidence in Druva because, “If I know that Druva cares and has competent people in the organization, what more do I need? It's clear that saving customers from disaster is what the people that work at Druva love to do." 

Recoveries happen much faster with Druva. The users don’t even know their data is being backed up. DiSarro says when users call for help and need to restore a file, their minds are blown when it’s restored so quickly. “It allows us to do things for them that they didn't know could be done. Somebody may have spilled a glass of water on a laptop, and 40 minutes later they have a new one in their hands with the last file they were working on. It’s something people just aren't expecting."

DiSarro’s small team spends at most an hour a week managing Druva. He reports, “Druva tells us if anything goes wrong." It’s a far cry from the design and maintenance-heavy backup and recovery solutions of the past. DiSarro explains, “Of course, managing backups for IT in the old days was a significant portion of what you did. That is no longer the case with Druva. All of that hassle is gone, and with it most of the risk." 

DiSarro is very happy with his decision to partner with Druva for his data protection solution. He says, “There just isn't anything we're thinking about on a ten-year plan that Druva either doesn’t already have solved or doesn’t have on the roadmap. That's really great, you know peace of mind is the cheesy way to say it, but with Druva, it’s true."