McHugh Construction Customer of Rubrik

Rubrik, Inc. announced that James McHugh Construction Co. (McHugh) has moved to Rubrik to securely backup and protect IT infrastructure.

The customer has confidence in its ability to recover from ransomware attacks and increased its IT teams’ operational efficiency through Rubrik’s automated policy engine.

Headquartered in Chicago, IL, McHugh is the builder of one-of-a-kind structures in Chicago and the Midwest. The company is one of the largest construction managers and general contractors in the US and has built some of Chicago’s most complex and recognizable structures including Marina City and Water Tower Place.

Its IT team supports more than 1,000 employees and contractors. Their goal is to be as flexible as possible, enabling end-users to complete construction projects on time and on budget. Ransomware attacks are on the rise across all industries and Rubrik is a part of McHugh’s defensive structure to ensure their business keeps moving in the event of an attack.

Using Rubrik, McHugh’s mission-critical applications and data are stored in an immutable format, preventing ransomware from accessing and encrypting backups. If hit, the team has new confidence in their ability to recover its data quickly.

“Construction is a tough business, each project is unique with its own set of challenges,” said Ronald Sinopoli, CIO, McHugh. “As an IT team, we strive to keep our systems available to help the business meet critical deadlines, increase overall efficiency, and ensure our data is secure. Rubrik’s data management solution is an essential part of this equation.“

Prior to Rubrik, McHugh was relying heavily on outside consultants for day-to-day maintenance and monitoring. The manual and time-consuming process meant the IT team lacked confidence that data was securely protected and that they could keep the business operational in the event of a system failure.

“With Rubrik’s automated policy engine, managing our backups takes a fraction of the time compared to our previous solution,” said Rombert Lazo, director of IT, McHugh. “We no longer rely on costly consultants for daily backup administration or performing recoveries. Rubrik is so easy to use that we have moved this function completely in-house and have increased our team’s operational efficiency enabling them to focus on our higher priority digital transformation initiatives. Rubrik is definitely a superior product and I haven’t seen anything comparable in the market.“

McHugh has achieved a 22% TCO savings with Rubrik by eliminating tape, support licenses, a warm site, and the need for consultants for day-to-day maintenance. As a result, it has been able to shift those cost savings towards increasing infrastructure speed by investing in new hardware or deploying modern devices like iPads across the company.

Additional results and benefits include: 

• Management time savings over previous solution: The team spends a fraction of their time managing Rubrik compared to their previous solution, and are able to focus on digital transformation initiatives.
• 66% reduction in data center footprint: Rubrik allowed to eliminate their tape library and reduced its data center footprint from 6U to 2U.
• Replication for DR: McHugh uses Rubrik to replicate data from HQs to their secondary DR site, and have conducted recovery testing on a critical server.
• Cloud agnostic: As McHugh explores moving to the cloud, they can examine different vendors and workloads without worrying about vendor lock-in as Rubrik is cloud-agnostic.

“If McHugh suffers a data outage or is hit by ransomware, then construction grinds to a halt across all 70+ projects in the US,” said Arvind Nithrakashyap, co-founder and CTO, Rubrik. “With Rubrik’s near-instant restores and immutable backups, McHugh has peace of mind knowing that they can get back online quickly and keep their projects moving forward.“

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