Emerson Electric Cuts Cloud Costs, Boosts Cyber Resilience with Commvault Cloud HyperScale X Solution

Emerson Electric Simplifies Multi-Cloud Data Protection with Commvault 

Emerson Electric streamlines data management across hybrid infrastructure with Commvault Cloud HyperScale X, reducing costs and enhancing cyber resilience. 

Securing the Multi-cloud Infrastructure 

Since its origins more than 130 years ago, Emerson Electric has revolutionized daily life, innovating modern conveniences such as electric fans and garbage disposals. Now focusing on industrial automation, the company has grown to 80,000 employees, multiple data centers, and more than 400 remote sites. 

Emerson’s complex landscape includes regular acquisitions and divestitures to consolidate its operations, requiring frequent migration. The company has also moved much of its data to multiple cloud providers and retains some on-premises. The company needs a data protection strategy to safeguard against the greatest threats of today and the future across its entire infrastructure. 

“We’re a global entity that generates massive amounts of sensitive data daily, so there are a lot of complexities that come with managing that much data,” said Zach Kruszewski, Manager CCoE Compute Architecture and Design Team Emerson Electric. “Security is a vital part of our focus and includes maintaining privacy, financial protection, reputation management, intellectual property, and compliance. As we transition from an on-prem business to more of a multi-cloud or hybrid type scenario, we need to adapt and become more efficient.” 

Centralization Data Protection

HyperScaleTM X (HSX) emerged as the right fit to deliver a combination of industry-leading security standards, automation, ease of use, and a way to unite all its applications and workloads. HSX offers a modern scale- out implementation that gives Emerson simplified deployment, limitless scale, and intelligent automation, including load-balancing. 

Commvault works across Emerson’s multi-cloud environment, which includes Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and soon, Amazon Web Services. 

At the same time, the move to Commvault allows Emerson to shrink the number of interfaces in its environment. 

“Commvault is super easy to use, cost-efficient, and flexible,” Kruszewski said. “It is an ideal tool to span our multi-faceted workloads across all our cloud vendors and on-premises from location to location. Other providers offer some great solutions, but if you look at the toolset holistically, Commvault has many more features and functions.” 

As part of Emerson’s comprehensive security strategy, Commvault gives the company one spot to manage its data protection workloads. 

“We can set policies, control how that data moves, control when that data’s encrypted or not, and where it’s replicated regionally or globally,” Kruszewski said. “We’ve put a lot of control and thought into these solutions that reside at edge locations.” 

With the ever-present risk of ransomware, Commvault is part of the company’s well-rounded defense. 

Reducing Ransomware Risks

“Ransomware is a high risk in our organization, and we’re taking numerous precautions to mitigate it,” Kruszewski said. “Commvault has been fantastic on that front. They have built-in ransomware protection, anomaly detection, and built-in hardened images.” 

With Commvault AirGap Protect in OCI and Azure, Emerson isolates data copies in an air-gapped, immutable security domain – fortifying cyber resilience. As the team migrates data, Kruszewski also appreciates the ability to move workloads seamlessly with on-the-fly format conversion, for example, from its Nutanix hypervisor to Azure. 

“Commvault’s given us an extreme amount of scalability and flexibility as we move from a more traditional on-prem strategy to a multi-cloud strategy – the best of both worlds,” Kruszewski said. “There is a tremendous amount of value in having a tool that can consolidate all that effort, give us a single pane of view, and allow us to facilitate those types of migrations.” 

Commvault recently rolled out additional cyber resiliency capabilities, including Cleanroom Recovery (CRR). In this unique test bed, Emerson can validate the effectiveness of cyber-recovery plans, technologies, and processes. The secure environment isolates and safeguards data and critical assets from attacks – unlike other cleanroom offerings limited to disaster recovery and a minimal set of workloads and recovery options. Security and IT leaders can obtain valuable insights into unfamiliar threat actors, fortify their strategies, and ensure uninterrupted business continuity. 

“Commvault Cloud Cleanroom Recovery not only enables organizations to test their recovery plans often, but know that if they’re hit, they can be resilient,” Kruszewski said. “Having this sense of security is so important in the ransomware era.”  

Achieving a 98% RTO SLA 

Since the move to Commvault, the infrastructure services team has reduced its operations resources needs by more than half. It consistently hits an RTO SLA of 98% and cut its year-over-year cloud costs substantially. 

“Why do we keep using it? Because it works and it’s less expensive than our previous solution,” Kruszewski said. 

Beyond that, in this high-stakes environment, Kruszewski and the team value most the peace of mind that they can recover from an event with zero loss, confidence, and immutability. In the future, they appreciate their ongoing, collaborative relationship with the team at Commvault. 

“The level of support and access that Commvault has provided is unparalleled,” Kruszewski said. “We have a very cohesive working relationship. Together, we’re shaping what the roadmap looks like.”