Report reveals the economic benefits of strong data protection
Commvault, an enterprise data protection leader for the complex and mission critical hybrid environments of today’s global businesses, announced with Microsoft the results of an independent study from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) showing real world cost savings driven by Commvault and Microsoft’s joint solutions for securing and protecting over one million terabytes – or One Exabyte – of customer data.
As enterprise organisations shift from traditional on-premises IT to cloud-based models, or hybrid mixes of on-prem and cloud resources, they are challenged by the fact that effective backup and restore capabilities become exponentially more complex in these models. Many companies are forced to make short-sighted decisions based on limits on budget, timeframe, or capability, and they often end up with a series of solutions that each handle part of the problem. This creates technical debt, which results in a portion of future IT budgets being squandered to remedy decisions of the past and limitations on the potential business impact of technology. With 70% of surveyed companies saying that they expect to create new data-centric products and services in the next 12 months, and data density growing at rates unseen in the past, the struggle of data protection often surpasses the abilities of many organisations.
ESG research found that 53% of surveyed respondents said their IT environment was more complex than it was two years ago. Digging deeper into the reasons for this increased complexity shows that 9 of the 13 top concerns were directly related to changes in data protection strategies.
A next-generation cloud-based data protection solution can help organisations with these struggles. The benefits of such a solution falls into three categories—cost efficiency, increased agility, and reduced risk. The survey uncovered that, over a 3-year period, a 9,000 person company with 24 locations can realise $807K in hardware and management cost savings, $4.3M in recovered IT FTE (full time equivalent) time, and 31% reduction in storage costs, all while reducing complexity, increasing protection, increasing restorability, and reducing risk.
Commvault Metallic’s enterprise-grade data protection, developed specifically to harness the full capabilities of Microsoft Azure, takes data protection to the next level, the research found. A 9,000 person company could experience 1,800 minor restore events per year. Each of these events would take an average of 30 minutes to address in the as-is environment but, with Commvault Metallic, it would only take 18 minutes. 5% of these events would be non-recoverable in the as-is environment, with less than 1% being non-recoverable with Metallic. The 3-year result of the benefit with Metallic is a savings of 1,629 hours of IT time and almost 1,400 hours recovered of general employee productivity.
As a SaaS-based solution, Metallic eliminates the need for hardware, software, and management tools. The survey revealed that this delivers a 3-year benefit of $726.3K with the elimination of physical appliances, as well as an additional benefit of $80.8K in reduced procurement, power, floor space, and cooling in the sample company scenario and found the benefits to be linear in other-sized organisations tested in our financial model.
“The financial and business impacts that our customers have reported in this study are nothing short of compelling – in fact, these benefits are why customers have entrusted Commvault to protect over one exabyte of data, and growing, on Microsoft Azure,” said Ranga Rajagopalan, Senior Vice President, Products, Commvault. “Together with Microsoft, we offer data protection that is cost efficient, agile, and secure – serving as the true catalyst for enterprises looking to streamline data operations and improve their data security posture while accelerating their digital transformation.”
Joint Commvault and Microsoft customers like Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT), have experienced the effects of shifting to a cloud-first strategy using Commvault’s Metallic SaaS technology built on the Azure cloud platform. Since implementation, NDOT has eliminated all of its physical backup infrastructure, removing management headaches and resulting in an ongoing savings of 25% in infrastructure costs, while also strengthening its ransomware protection with insights that help spot risks and reduce threats.
“Commvault lets us consolidate our backups to a single solution…this gives us flexibility and scalability – and we aren’t locked into one specific restore location,” said Sherri McGee, Chief of the Information Technology Division, NDOT. “As we continue migrating our systems and applications to Microsoft Azure, we know our backups are secure. And if we ever find a vulnerability on-premises or in our virtual machines on Azure, we know that if we restore from Metallic, we will be clean of those vulnerabilities.”
“At a time when businesses face unprecedented challenges to secure their data from ransomware, reduce costs and optimise their data environments, Commvault’s collaboration with Microsoft is delivering strong results for our joint customers,” said Katy Brown, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Enterprise Sales, Software and Digital Platforms. “Through our long-term collaboration, we have consistently enabled an accelerated, secure path to cloud transformation on Microsoft Azure for customers across segments and industries.”
According to Nathan McAfee, Senior Analyst at ESG and lead analyst on this study, “It’s clear that the results achieved with Commvault’s software on Microsoft Azure show strong consistency across most industries, customer profiles, and organisation size. The variety of workloads that the combined solution protects is impressive and a significant factor that helps organisations reduce vendors, and thereby reduce technical debt, complexity, and risk.”
More than 100,000 organisations have chosen Commvault to protect their business critical data. To learn more about why and read the full ESG study, “Analysing the Economic Benefits of Data Protection with Commvault on Microsoft Azure,” please visit: https://commvault.com/the-economic-benefits-of-data-protection-with-commvault-on-microsoft-azure.
