Beckman Coulter secures data management with Cohesity backup as a service

The Challenge

Until 2019 Beckman Coulter used a variety of backup solutions in its largest global offices, including Arcserve, Dell Avamar, Veeam, and Veritas Backup Exec. “Not having a standard backup solution made it complicated to monitor global backups and make sure we were meeting our service level agreements (SLAs),” says Kevin Chi, IT Systems Engineer at Beckman Coulter. Each office needed an engineering specialist familiar with that location’s backup solution, increasing costs. The existing solutions didn’t protect against ransomware, a growing business risk. And the company wanted to switch to a SaaS model for backups and archiving for smaller locations, part of its “cloud-first” initiative to reduce on-prem infrastructure costs and management overhead.

The Solution

Evaluating data management platforms to become the company standard, Beckman Coulter compared all of its existing solutions plus Cohesity. “Cohesity’s platform stood out because of its simple management interface and ransomware protection with immutable backups,” Chi says. “We also liked that we could order an appliance with the right configuration for each location instead of hassling with a complex configuration process.”

Today the company’s nine major datacenter locations on three continents use Cohesity DataProtect to back up and recover NetApp files, Nutanix AHV, and Oracle ERP data to local Cohesity clusters. A centralized operations team monitors all backups in all locations from one interface, simplifying management, reporting, and audits. Data restores are fast. “In our Phoenix office, we can meet 85% of requests to restore files, VMs, or ERP data in less than 24 hours,” Chi says.

In 2022, Chi turned to Cohesity to solve another challenge. “We have a cloud-first policy, and we wanted to switch to cloud backup and archives for our smaller offices,” he says. The company decided to start with its Colorado R&D facility, using Cohesity DataProtect delivered as a service to back up and archive Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines and shared services like the DHCP and file servers.

After narrowing down backup as a service (BaaS) options to Cohesity, Commvault, and Veaam, Beckman Coulter selected Cohesity. “With Cohesity Backup as a service we don’t need on-premises infrastructure for our smaller locations,” Chi says. “We have a unified view of all backups—on-prem or in the cloud—helping us meet SLAs. And now we don’t need to worry about complying with long-term retention requirements because Cohesity does it automatically.”

With Cohesity and AWS we have great technology—and also great partners. Our Cohesity team is invested in making sure we’re successful with deployment and support, and that we have the features we need to protect the business today and into the future.

Kevin Chi

IT Systems Engineer, Beckman Coulter Life Sciences

The Results

Today Beckman Coulter uses Cohesity to back up 330 TB of data in 11 locations in North America, France, Ireland, and India—183 TB in Phoenix alone. With the simple management interface, a central operations team can now manage backups and restores, avoiding the need for engineering specialists in each location.

The company’s security posture is stronger now. One reason: with Cohesity’s immutable backups, the company can restore clean data in the event of a ransomware attack, avoiding costs and business interruption. In addition, the Cohesity dashboard alerts the operations team to anomalous activity that could signal a cyberattack, such as a big change in the number of files from one backup to the next. “Recently we received an alert on the Cohesity dashboard that hundreds of application files had been deleted,” Chi recalls. “The application team let us know they were doing updates, so there was no cause for alarm. If it had been an attack, we had the comfort of knowing we could have restored the files from an immutable backup.” Finally, the company now installs software releases containing security enhancements as soon as they’re available while updates to backup as a service are handled directly by Cohesity. “With our old backup solution we sometimes postponed software upgrades because they required downtime,” Chi says. “With the Cohesity non-disruptive upgrades we update regularly every quarter, making sure we have the latest security features.”

Chi concludes, “With Cohesity we have great technology—and also a great partner. Our Cohesity team is vested in making sure we’re successful with deployment and support, and that we have the features we need to protect the business today and into the future.”