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Randstad Spain is one of the country’s leading human resources and workforce solutions providers. They support large-scale hiring campaigns, manage candidate data, and enable organizations to connect with talent quickly and securely.
Randstad Spain operates as a digital-first, cloud-driven talent platform, where large-scale automation, data-intensive workloads, and strict regulatory requirements make resilient, centralized, and auditable cloud backup and disaster recovery essential to the business.
With thousands of employees and hundreds of thousands of daily digital transactions, Randstad Spain handles enormous volumes of personal and operational data, requiring scalable, automated cloud backup and disaster recovery to ensure business continuity and compliance.
Human Resources: Managing Large Volumes of Sensitive Data
As a leading human resources company, Randstad Spain handles vast amounts of personally identifiable information, from candidate records to employment and client data—all subject to strict regulations like GDPR.
David Encinar, Cloud Infrastructure Manager at Randstad Spain, leads the team responsible for an exceptionally complex AWS environment. The organization operates a multi-account, multi-region setup with strict separation between production, development, and testing workloads. Its infrastructure spans thousands of EC2 instances, extensive managed services like Amazon RDS, containerized workloads on EKS, and serverless functions.
“In our industry, every architectural decision is viewed through the lens of security and data privacy,” says David. “There is no room for shortcuts.”
The Challenge
Before implementing a dedicated cloud-native solution, the team’s primary pain point was the fragmented and manual nature of their data protection strategy. “We were relying on a patchwork of custom-written Lambda scripts to trigger EBS snapshots, which was brittle and difficult to manage at scale.”, said David.
This resulted in several critical issues:
- Lack of Centralized Visibility: “We had no single pane of glass to verify backup success, check compliance status, or manage policies across our dozens of AWS accounts.”
- Unreliable Recovery: “Restoring an entire application environment was a complex, manual orchestration that was both slow and prone to human error, putting our Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) at significant risk.”
- Audit and Compliance Burden: “Proving compliance with our data retention policies to auditors was a time-consuming, manual process of aggregating logs and reports from disparate sources.”
The Solution: N2W Value Realized in Days, Not Months
The team discovered N2W on the AWS Marketplace. Its exclusive focus on AWS, strong customer reviews and being offered the security of an IaaS rather than SaaS solution is what stood out. An additional recommendation from Randstad’s AWS Solutions Architect, highlighting that N2W had been “just working” for nearly 15 years for major companies sealed the team’s confidence in the platform.
The impact of N2W was immediate. Within the first week, the time David’s team spent maintaining and troubleshooting backup scripts dropped by more than 80 percent. Policies that once required custom logic were now centrally defined and automatically enforced across accounts using tags.
“That was the moment everything changed. For the first time, we had predictability. We knew we could recover quickly, reliably, and under pressure.”
—David Encinar, Cloud Infrastructure Manager
From Day One, N2W delivered key capabilities that transformed backup and disaster recovery at Randstad Spain:
Automated DR Drills:
The real proof came during Randstad Spain’s first full disaster recovery test with N2W in place. A process that had previously required most of a day and several engineers was completed in under an hour.
“That was the moment everything changed,” says David. “For the first time, we had predictability. We knew we could recover quickly, reliably, and under pressure.”
Simplified Policy Driven Backup:
With N2W, Randstad Spain shifted to a policy-driven model for backup and disaster recovery. Schedules, retention rules, and cross-region replication are defined once and automatically applied across the environment. As new workloads are deployed, they are protected by default, without manual intervention.
Easy To Use:
Centralized management provides a single, authoritative view of protection status across the entire AWS organization.
Tamper-Proof Immutability:
The team embraced immutable air gapped backup copies of their most recent backup. With the threat of ransomware, having backups that are logically separated and cannot be altered or deleted by a compromised account is your last line of defense.
Highly Secure DR:
Cross-region and cross-account recovery capabilities support Randstad Spain’s resilience and data isolation strategy.
Effortless File-Level Recovery:
For most of their day-to-day operational requests, the ability to mount a snapshot and recover individual files without restoring an entire volume saves the team an immense amount of time.
Rapid Compliance:
Today, Randstad Spain operates with greater confidence in its ability to protect sensitive HR data, meet regulatory requirements, and recover quickly from disruption.
Lessons from Randstad Spain
For David and his team at Randstad Spain, backup and disaster recovery are no longer a source of operational risk, they are a source of assurance.
David’s three pieces of advice to other backup and DR leaders are straightforward:
- Prioritize recovery over backup: Anyone can back up data. Your value is determined by how quickly, reliably, and securely you can recover it.
- Do regular testing: Test your recovery procedures relentlessly.
- Stop thinking of backup as an IT task: It’s a business-enabling process.
In an industry built on trust, the ability to recover data quickly, securely, and demonstrably is not optional. It is fundamental to protecting candidates, clients, and the brand itself.