The organization: Meet Skechers
Skechers, the iconic comfort technology company, sells a wide range of footwear and apparel products. It boasts more than 15,000 employees and operates within nearly every country across the globe.
Like most retailers operating on a massive scale, Skechers relies on a complex set of IT assets to connect its many teams and move information seamlessly across the business. Those assets include applications, databases, and other resources that are hosted on multiple clouds – including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – across disparate cloud regions.
The challenge: Achieving standardized backup and recovery
Historically, Skechers employed a diverse mix of backup and recovery tools within its various cloud environments and other systems. But when Gabriel Sandoval, Manager of Cloud Engineering, came on board, the company’s IT organization was on a mission to standardize the business’s IT tooling, including the software it used to manage backup and recovery operations. “Our mixed IT ecosystem was hampering our ability to grow,” Sandoval says.
When it came to choosing a solution to drive backup and recovery standardization, the choice was clear to Sandoval, who advocated strongly for N2W. Having used the product with great success in roles at previous companies, he knew it would deliver the simplicity that his team sought, while also keeping costs in check and enabling highly reliable data recovery across Skechers’ complex IT environments. “It was an easy pitch to make to management,” he says of his efforts to encourage the organization’s adoption of the product.
Building value through data protection simplicity, cost-savings, and reliability
N2W quickly began delivering the value that Sandoval had expected – starting with the product’s simple setup process.
“It was ridiculously easy to implement. It was just a matter of a few clicks, and the support we got was hands-down some of the best. They walked us through everything from start to finish, then made sure the product was fully up and running properly.”
He adds that this hands-on support was available as a core part of the N2W product offering, without requiring additional payment. “In my experience, I have not seen that type of hand-holding without having to pay a separate consulting fee…That is a big kudos to N2W.”
The solution also proved highly valuable from a cost perspective.
Skechers saves money by taking advantage of the ability to store data directly in low-cost cloud storage and automatically cycle backups to lower-cost storage tiers as the data ages. “I don’t see from any other player in the backup and recovery market right now,” Sandoval notes.
He adds that the ability to automate cross-region backup and recovery operations is also a money-saver for Skechers because it makes it easy to migrate to different cloud regions based on which ones offer the lowest costs. “When you plug in N2W, you’ll see immediate savings,” Sandoval says. That’s important because “we were able to put that money back into the business to achieve greater headcount.”
Of course, low-cost backups are not worth much if they don’t enable successful recovery. That’s why N2W’s dry-run feature is so important. As Sandoval notes, “Being able to test how we recover everything – our file systems, our databases, our applications – through a dry run is really powerful. It lets us plan ahead of time how we’ll recover, and confirm that our plans will actually work.”
Standardizing N2W across multiple cloud environments
At first, Skechers deployed N2W within just a few key cloud environments. But now that Sandoval and his team have fully validated the solution and gained a deep understanding of the unique value it offers in terms of ease of use, cost, and reliability, they’re rolling it across the rest of the company’s IT estate.
“Standardization is everything – and as we standardize by creating a global framework that Skechers uses across the board, N2W is a big part of that process,” Sandoval explains.
Modernize and optimize your data protection strategy
See for yourself how N2W can bring ridiculously simple, cost-effective, and powerful backup and recovery capabilities to your organization by scheduling a custom demo.
