Dr. Martens modernises its global data protection and retention strategy with 11:11 Systems.

Client Profile
Dr. Martens is an iconic British brand founded in 1960 in Northamptonshire. Originally produced for workers looking for tough, durable boots, the brand was quickly adopted by diverse youth subcultures and associated musical movements. Dr. Martens has since transcended its working-class roots while still celebrating its proud heritage and, six decades later, “Docs” or “DMs” are worn by people around the world who use them as a symbol of empowerment and their own individual attitude.

Worldwide Data Retention and Protection for the Digital Age:
With 158 stores and 191 third-party stores around the globe — not to mention a burgeoning direct-to-consumer (DTC) business, which now includes 13 websites — Dr. Martens is the definition of a truly modern, global business. What it needed, however, was a truly modern, global data retention and protection strategy.

Dan Morgan, Global Head of Cloud and Infrastructure at Dr. Martens, along with his team of engineers, is responsible for directing and overseeing the company’s long-term infrastructure strategy. With Dr. Martens and its data growing at a rapid pace, it was clear to Morgan that the company could benefit greatly from the security, resiliency and global availability of cloud. This meant moving away from traditional data retention strategies, including some of its on-premises environments. “Technology, particularly cloud technology, has become ever more critical to the business. Over time, our IT strategy is to migrate from traditional on-premises infrastructure to cloud infrastructure,” said Morgan. “This is so we can benefit from increased resilience, increased performance capacity and remove the need for expensive hardware refreshes. We needed a solution that integrated into our existing estate and could be managed easily by our team.” To help the business keep pace with modern data retention and protection best practices, Dr. Martens turned to 11:11 Systems to manage its cloud transition, which now includes 11:11 Cloud Backup for Veeam Cloud Connect and 11:11 Backup for Microsoft 365. Globally available and fully-integrated with Veeam’s industry-leading technology, 11:11 ensures that Dr. Martens’ data is secure and available continuously no matter where it lives, from London to Sydney to Los Angeles. For Morgan and his team, this translated into the most precious of IT commodities: peace of mind. “The entire 11:11 experience has been so positive. Their team was remarkably helpful and supportive throughout the entire implementation process, from hearing and understanding our requirements to getting the solutions deployed quickly,” said Morgan. “We evaluated other cloud service providers, but they simply couldn’t meet our needs for global availability and compliance. It’s clear that 11:11 is recognised as an industry leader for a reason.”

Building True Resilience with 11:11 Systems

When talking with Morgan, a single theme stands out: The importance of resilience. With today’s ever-shifting IT landscape, businesses, especially those with the global footprint of Dr. Martens, simply cannot afford to be caught off guard by vulnerabilities. That’s why, when evaluating potential loud service providers, Morgan prioritised the ability to ensure resilience for Dr. Martens and its global network — in the face of hardware failure, increasing cyberthreats, IT skills shortages, supply chain delays and any other would-be disasters. In the end, 11:11 offered exactly what Morgan had in mind. With solutions designed to meet the highest possible standards for security, compliance, performance and availability, the combination of 11:11 Cloud Backup and 11:11 Backup for Microsoft 365, served to modernise Dr. Martens infrastructure simply, cost-effectively, and securely. With the cloud console, 11:11’s award-winning, unified management platform, Morgan is also afforded unmatched monitoring, control and visibility into the company’s workloads. This, along with 11:11’s dedicated on-boarding, support and account management teams, means Morgan and his team can
be as hands-on or hands-off as their workflow dictates. “11:11 and its solutions don’t require a lot of hand holding, or dayto-day management. That’s one of the reasons why we chose them. Before, if things were to go horribly wrong, it might have been a painful experience for us, especially with such a small team,” said Morgan. “I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend 11:11 Systems to anyone. It’s really quite refreshing to partner with a company that does exactly what it says it will do.”

The Ever-Present Threat of Cybercrime

Perhaps the biggest threat to business resiliency today is, of course, cybercrime — which continues to skyrocket for organisations of all sizes and sectors around the world. Ransomware attacks, for example, are expected to impact a business, consumer or device every two seconds by 2031, up from every 11 seconds in 2021, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. Over that same time frame, the total global costs of ransomware are expected to increase from $20 billion to a staggering $265 billion. As attacks increase in frequency, size, and sophistication, so too does the relevance of backup
solutions that offer data multi-layered protection. “We take cybercrime very seriously, especially as our brand becomes more and more recognisable,” said Morgan. “11:11 Cloud Backup provides that extra level of comfort and resiliency. If we were to get compromised, we know we’re in safe hands.”
With 11:11, Dr. Martens boasts a truly modern and resilient business continuity strategy with the ability to protect its data from a wide range of external and internal threats. The final piece to this strategy was 11:11 Cloud Backup for Microsoft 365, which helps fill the gaps in Microsoft’s limited retention policy.

DR MARTENS CASE STUDY

While Microsoft 365 has changed productivity in the workplace forever, it simply wasn’t designed with data protection in mind. That’s why Dr. Martens opted to increase the long-term data protection and retention capabilities for its more than 4,000 Exchange, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive users.
“While the Microsoft standard service is fine in terms of keeping data safe, we needed something that was going to offer us more functionality than the traditional default,” said Morgan. “11:11 Backup for Microsoft 365 just works. It’s less about saving time and money on a day-to-day basis and more about improving the company’s overall level of service and resiliency.” Morgan views Dr. Martens’ commitment to promoting and ensuring security and resiliency with 11:11 as a reflection of the company’s ultimate commitment to its key stakeholders and supporters. He concluded: “Without the 11:11 Systems solutions in place, we would be carrying a much higher level of risk. We’ve now got the best of both worlds — the luxury of increased service
quality and resiliency without the burden of expending precious time and management resources.”

Tree Top simplifies business continuity strategy with 11:11 Systems and Veeam

Client Profile
Tree Top is a grower-owned cooperative committed to producing and innovating world-class fruit products, including top-quality juices, sauces, and premium ingredients. Founded over 60 years ago in the heart of Washington’s apple country, the co-op is now a global business with over 1,000 growers, engineers, and food scientists. True to its small-town heritage and values, Tree Top prioritises craftsmanship and sustainability above all, saving millions of pounds of excess fruit per year. For more information, visit www.treetop.com.

Data Security and Retention for the ‘Modern Era’

With Tree Top — and its data output — continuing to grow, Josh Greisen, director of IT operations, set out to modernise and simplify the company’s overall data retention strategy. Up until that point, much of Tree Top’s primary infrastructure was still being backed up on-premises via physical disk. In order to implement on-site and off-site storage, and disaster recovery more in line with industry best practices, Greisen and his team needed to embark on a project to replace much of the company’s existing legacy infrastructure.

To that end, Tree Top enlisted the help of trusted-partner CompuNet, which first recommended partnering with Veeam®, the leader in backup, recovery and data management solutions that deliver Modern Data Protection, for backup on-premises. However, that was only one piece of the puzzle, as Greisen still wanted a cloud solution that could store and protect the company’s mission-critical data offsite. “We knew it was in the company’s best interests to replace all its legacy infrastructure in favour of a new backup solution,” said Greisen. “We worked with CompuNet and their engineers to better understand the market and the best way to implement the necessary hardware and software. We wanted to bring our backups into the modern era.” When it came to finding the right cloud services provider, Greisen and his team again worked with CompuNet to survey the market and find a vendor that was the perfect fit. Ultimately, it was 11:11 Systems’ suite of secure cloud data protection solutions that rose above the competition, offering the right combination of technical solutions, support, and transparency to meet Tree Top’s needs. “From the beginning, it was our goal to ensure that all of our mission-critical applications would be securely stored offsite in case of a major disaster,” said Greisen. “As the person in charge of making that decision, it was especially important to me that we did our due diligence and found the right vendor to meet our specific needs. We ended up doing a pretty thorough market analysis, which is where 11:11 Systems entered the picture.”

To complete its new-look business continuity strategy, Tree Top decided to implement 11:11 Cloud DRaaS for Veeam, 11:11 Cloud Backup for Veeam Cloud Connect, and 11:11 Cloud Backup for Microsoft 365. With all three solutions combined to offer ever-ready, integrated, and multi-layered security, Tree Top’s data will remain safe and easily recoverable regardless of where it resides. The decision to structure the company’s data protection strategy this way, according to Greisen, came down to his team’s cost-benefit analysis. Ultimately, a simple math calculation. “Our reasoning can be traced back to our initial cost-benefit analysis,” said Greisen. “For example, if our whole data center gets destroyed, whether it’s because of a fire, flood, or ransomware event, and our network is down, how long will it take for our employees to resume their jobs? There’s a cost to all of that.” For businesses, unplanned downtime can reap potentially devastating consequences, including reputational damage and, of course, loss of revenue. According to a recent enterprise survey, 91 percent of organisations equated a single hour of downtime to more than $300,000 in damages — an estimation that has only risen in recent years, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and increase in cybercrime. Unfortunately, that number is simply too high for most organisations to bear. Of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more, 50 percent filed for bankruptcy
immediately and an astounding 93 percent did so within a year of the incident, according to the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington. If Tree Top were to continue its replication and backup entirely on premises and then suffer the loss of its data center, Greisen knew
it would take a matter of months for his team to get back up and running — perhaps longer given the ongoing supply chain delays across the globe. With 11:11 replicating all of Tree Top’s data to the cloud, Griesen’s team can instead failover critical VMs in the 11:11 Cloud and recover backups in a matter of hours. Simple math. “If we had a major issue in our data center, it would take two-tothree months minimum to order all the hardware, configure it, and get back up and running,” said Greisen. “So we go from two to-three months to less than 24 hours? I don’t know what that
cost-benefit number is off the top of my head, but it’s there.”

Looming Threat of Cybercrime
With cybercrime undoubtedly on the rise, Tree Top’s partnership with 11:11 and Veeam couldn’t have come at a better time. Ransomware attacks, for example, are expected to impact a business, consumer, or device every two seconds by 2031, up from every 11 seconds in 2021. While the total global costs of ransomware are expected to increase from $20 billion to $265 billion over the same time frame. As attacks continue to increase in frequency, size, and sophistication, so too does the relevance of backup and disaster recovery solutions that offer data multi-layered protection. While Greisen’s decision wasn’t specifically related to cybercrime, he can nonetheless rest easy knowing that Tree Top has a reliable safety net in place. This will become ever-more critical, particularly as the company continues to do business with big-name retailers, who have already begun to require that partners institute certain cybersecurity-related measures. “There’s a long list of things that can ruin you from an IT perspective, and
cybercrime is definitely one of them,” said Greisen. “We do our best to mitigate all those things by having the correct architecture for backup and recovery. If you get hit with ransomware, it’s critical that your backups, especially your offsite backups, aren’t impacted.”