Rebooting Data Management for the Digital Era

For many companies, digitization is deemed necessary. If they want to increase productivity, improve time to market, and respond to market needs faster, they need to convert manual processes into digital workflows and move them into the cloud. 

Yet, many mission-critical applications, which process vast amounts of data, still need to be kept running all the time. CEO of Rubrik, Bipul Sinha, sees his company's solution as a means to ease digitization and workflow management headaches.

Rubrik is essentially a cloud data management platform that helps enterprises manage their data, leverage cloud technology, and keep applications running. Its copy data management delivers instant data access in the event of a failure due to natural disaster or human error.

As a single platform that delivers data protection, search and analytics, archiving, and compliance, Rubrik claims it can cut total cost of ownership (TCO) in half and slash daily management time down to minutes.

Resilience and Governance as a Platform

Sivantos Group agrees. As one of the world's leading providers and innovators of hearing aids based in Singapore, the company needed to support the company's rapid growth. It also wanted to standardize their data management platform across its six global data centers, while ensuring that its IT infrastructure was well aligned with business objectives.

At first, it considered multi-point solutions. But the greatest challenge for Sivantos was the lack of integration, which created an unmanageable and complex environment. The recovery of a single file was extremely long and difficult. With the company growing fast, Sivantos struggled with increasing costs from its legacy environment.

"We needed a solution that was cheaper to operate, [and was] simple, fast, and scalable," said Geoffrey Lem, Sivantos' global head for Datacentre Services. "When we migrated to Nutanix, we wanted a solution that would integrate seamlessly with our primary infrastructure and simplify our operations. Rubrik not only solved our problems but also provided one-click management and easy scalability, on-premises and in the cloud."

Deployment was done in a day, and integration with Nutanix was "seamless."

“Rubrik is natively built to be flash-optimized, giving us a 10 times improvement in backup performance,” said Lem. “With predictive search, Rubrik simplified the recovery process to at least 3 times faster, if not more.”

According to Lem, Rubrik's ability to do recovery, search and set service level agreement policies with a single click, its single pane of management across global sites, and easy-to-integrate cloud-native architecture resulted in "a 60% reduction in TCO by eliminating licensing, support, and tape costs."

In the past few years, the evolving framework around data governance and the rising number of data breaches showed that having a data recovery platform is not enough. Enterprises and governments increasingly require a more holistic data management platform that covers compliance, governance, and security.

"A platform like Rubrik becomes the foundation because not only are we providing that continuity to data, but we are also providing governance policies to help implement those strict regulatory requirements [sic]," said Kamal Brar, vice president for Rubrik, Asia Pacific and Japan. "A lot of regulatory data trends see countries like Indonesia, Singapore, and even India, mandating where data has to reside so there's no data moving outside of the country. As a global bank, I may be reporting for SEA, but I can't have that data roll out into another region because of the strict regulatory requirements."

The Ransomware Scourge

Meanwhile, Sinha pointed to the rise of ransomware as another reason for the intense focus on governance. "In the last few years, one of the main vectors of attack has been ransomware," said Sinha. "Rubrik not only backs up your data, but it also has fundamental ransomware recovery solutions. So that's a very compelling reason for our customers and businesses - existing legacy platforms don't have that."

Langs Building Supplies, a leading manufacturer and supplier of construction products based in Queensland, Australia, was hit by a ransomware attack.

“There was no potential for real long-term financial damage because we have Rubrik,” said Matthew Day, Langs’ ICT and support manager.

After receiving an alert from the monitoring system, Day was able to isolate the affected VDI desktop and prevent the attack from spreading to the rest of the firm’s infrastructure. “We were able to write a script to restore files back to the VM from the latest version of the file because of our backup. We had all of our files back to the file server in approximately one hour. No damage done,” he said.

According to Day, the best way to mitigate ransomware attacks by defense-in-depth that integrates security with data protection. “You’ll always have weaknesses. That’s why you need rock-solid data management. You always have to be moving forward instead of looking back. Since we plan for these failures, this threat was reduced to a minor inconvenience. The next day, it was like nothing happened.”

Cargo and passenger airline, ASL Airlines France (ASL), based in Charles de Gaulle airport, Europe's second-busiest air traffic hub, has been a frequent target for ransomware. It experiences at least one attack per month.

"In the past, we managed to recover by using a multitude of scripts to identify and erase infected files manually," said Fabrice De Biasio, ASL's chief information officer. "This was an incredibly painful, time-consuming experience that killed our team's productivity for days."

Now, with Rubik’s Radar, a machine learning-powered anomaly detection and accelerated recovery, the team saves up to over 40 hours of manually monitoring applications. As a result, they are confident in their ability to quickly restore to the pre-infected state in the event of a threat.

“Our team can spend more time on digital transformation activities that deliver value back to the business,” said De Biasio.