Case Study
How Hyatt Cut Server Backup Costs by 75%
CrashPlan Chosen as the Global Technology Standard for All Properties
Customer
Hyatt Hotels
Solution
Server Backup and Recovery
Business Case At-a-Glance
75%
Lower server backup costs vs. previous solution
CrashPlan as Hyatt’s sole Global Technology Standard for backup
More than 1,700+ properties globally
At Hyatt, corporate IT sets technology standards for their more than 1,700 properties around the world. Any solution Hyatt chooses must work across a wide range of environments, from a small hotel with two servers to a 2,000-room property with a much larger IT footprint.
Hyatt’s previous backup model didn’t meet these diverse requirements, or budget dynamics. It required an appliance at each property and came with 5-figure financial minimums that were difficult for smaller hotels to justify.
Hyatt chose CrashPlan to give its properties a SaaS-based backup solution that better fit the way the business operates and cut backup costs by more than 75%.
“The main reason we chose CrashPlan was that we were getting a more flexible solution that cut backup costs by about 75%.”
Art Chernobrov
Associate Vice President, Identity, Cloud and Compute, Hyatt Hotels
One Standard Had to Work Across Very Different Hotels
Hyatt’s hotel technology model is decentralized by design. Corporate IT establishes the standards, while individual properties set up and manage their own backup environments — and Hyatt wanted the flexibility to shift to a more centralized model in the future.
Just as important, the solution had to work for properties of very different sizes. A backup model that made sense for a large hotel with a significant server footprint could be far too expensive for a smaller property with only two or three servers. Hyatt partner Microsoft introduced CrashPlan, knowing it would hit the mark in this environment.
Critical Hotel Systems Still Run On Premises
Hyatt continues to reduce the physical IT footprint at its hotels and move appropriate workloads to the cloud. But some systems still need to run locally.
Those systems support many of the day-to-day functions that keep a hotel operating, including:
- Property management interfaces
- Room charges
- point-of-sale systems
- Call accounting
- Door locks and key cards
- ERP applications
There are also international properties where financial data must remain in-country.
The on-premises footprint may be shrinking, but it isn’t disappearing. The systems that remain still need to be protected.
The Old Backup Model Didn’t Scale
Under Hyatt’s previous model, each property needed a dedicated backup appliance. Hotels had to purchase the appliance, manage it, and replace it when it reached end of life.
The service also came with significant minimum commitments. A hotel with only two servers could be looking at a five-figure annual bill—and would need to add a third server just to back up the first two.
That might be workable for a large hotel. For a smaller property, the economics simply didn’t make sense.
The cost created a more serious problem: some properties chose not to back up their servers at all.
“In the hotel business, the question is always, ‘Will this put heads in beds?’ A backup solution isn’t going to do that. We had to give hotels a cost-effective option that made the IT manager and Director of Finance happy and actually did the job of protecting data.” — Art Chernobrov, Hyatt Hotels
Lower Costs Changed the Adoption Equation
Art estimates that Hyatt has reduced its server backup costs by at least 75% with CrashPlan.
For hotels that were already backing up their servers, that meant significant savings.
But the bigger impact came from properties that had previously decided backup was simply too expensive. A hotel that had rejected a five-figure annual price could now protect its systems without buying another appliance or committing to a solution designed for a much larger environment.
The result was not only lower cost — more properties were backing up critical systems that had previously gone unprotected.
Secure multi-tenancy with global oversight and control
Cost was only one part of the standardization problem.
Because individual Hyatt properties manage their own backup environments, each hotel needed to operate their own backups without being able to see or affect another hotel.
Secure Multi-Tenancy
CrashPlan’s multi-tenant model and role-based access control, allows Hyatt to keep data and policies separate while retaining global visibility and control.
No Additional Hardware to Manage
CrashPlan is delivered as a cloud-based service, so properties do not need to buy, maintain, or refresh dedicated backup hardware.
That supports Hyatt’s broader effort to reduce the physical technology footprint at its hotels.
Easy for IT Generalists
Hotel IT professionals typically cover a broad range of responsibilities. The same person may be troubleshooting a server, managing the network, and resolving an in-room connectivity issue on the same day.
Resilient to Turnover
CrashPlan had to be straightforward enough for an IT generalist to manage without specialized backup expertise. And with considerable turnover in hotel IT teams, when one IT manager leaves, the next person can pick up the process and keep it moving.
Art has a straightforward way of measuring whether a solution is working: if something is going badly in hospitality, he’ll hear about it quickly. With CrashPlan, the feedback he receives is that it just works.
Looking Ahead
Hyatt will continue moving systems and applications to the cloud where it makes sense. But there will always be technology that needs to remain at the hotel because of operational, application, performance, or regulatory requirements.
CrashPlan gives Hyatt a consistent backup standard that can scale down for a small property, scale up for a larger hotel, and adapt as the mix of cloud and on-premises technology changes. The CrashPlan platform supports a broad range of data sources like Microsoft 365, endpoints, and a growing list of on-prem and cloud-based servers — giving Hyatt a smooth transition path forward.
