As a Warsaw Stock Exchange (WIG 20) key national company, much of PGNiG’s data is extremely sensitive, requiring rigorous security and compliance procedures. Due to this and with additional regional regulations like the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), PGNiG needed extremely granular data classification, access management and reporting specifying the types of owned data. These elements dictate compliance requirements on recovery times, or the volume of possible data loss, which need to be maintained. At the same time, the company needed a consolidated central data protection system for the company’s five branches as part of a single backup domain.
The three stage implementation initially covered protection of virtual environments, mobile devices and email archiving before being expanded to application security, dedicated mobile devices security, data protection for the branches and expansion of archiving of the MS Exchange mail system with compliance elements, such as journaling, full-text data indexing and a dashboard for security teams. These features help ensure compliance, speed audit processes and allow for assigning legal hold procedures.
Previously at PGNiG, many different solutions were being used in parallel. After the Commvault implementation, backed-up data is assigned to five precisely defined layers. Data classified in lower layers is secured with different RTOs and RPOs, along with separate retention and backup guidelines.
The Commvault solution minimised business risk by providing full protection of all virtual environments, workstations and the MS Exchange mail system backup. In addition to mail system archiving and application protection for Oracle servers and Exadata storage, the implementation will cover about 500 endpoints. In total, Commvault protection covers approximately 200 TB of data, including 90 TB of data in a virtual environment, 75 TB of application data, 25 TB as part of the mail system and 15 TB data from mobile devices.
“We discovered the full potential of Commvault Platform during a transformation workshop organised by the company, as part of which Commvault assessed our organisation’s maturity in the areas of data management and information,” added Przemys?aw Weso?owski, IT Infrastructure Director, PGNiG SA. “The workshops resulted in recommendations that delivered greater competitive advantage to our business by making different data sets more immediately and easily visible to our executives, as well as providing greater speed and accuracy in terms of compliance – a critical factor when our business has so much commercially sensitive data and the impending GDPR legislation requirements incoming into effect in 2018.”
Archiving PGNiG’s mail system will also make it possible to significantly reduce the volume of data managed in MS Exchange by 50-60%. The process will shorten relevant backup windows and significantly reduce license costs. Backups of data of lesser business importance, such as the mail system or unstructured files, will be transferred to the Commvault Platform archive system, reducing costs while keeping full access to archive backups. In the future, a disaster recovery centre will be set up to support the most critical data, as well as a data replication system for the backup site.
“We are very pleased to see some of the largest multi-national organisations in Poland – like PGNiG – able to use our solutions to gain competitive advantage and compliance assurance,” said Agnieszka May-Sadowska, Area-Vice President, Central East EMEA, Commvault. “With organisations universally facing huge data growth and fast-changing business and technology conditions, they need seamless infrastructure development without costly investment. The Commvault Data Platform provides flexibility, scalability and business value using any combination of existing hardware infrastructure or new cloud investments.”
