City of Everett: Migrating To Office 365, Managing Sensitive Data

By Sandra Hamilton

Today, organizations and individuals are being faced with some unprecedented challenges. How do we communicate, help and quickly address the essential needs of our customers, staff and families in a time of crisis?  It’s during these times that we need to hear good news and positive stories to help us deal with these stressful events. I recently came across a great example of this on one of my social feeds, SomeGoodNews  – a YouTube channel hosted by actor John Krasinski dedicated to sharing positive news and stories from around the world to help bring a smile during these uncertain times. 

With that in mind, I wanted to share a wonderful story about one our own customers – the City of Everett, Wash.

Electronic discovery is critical to our business, and Commvault Activate’s innovative data governance capabilities allow us to search, identify and manage data to meet compliance and legal hold requirements and lock down sensitive files. Entrusting Commvault for these critical business capabilities has saved us time and resources while minimizing risk and delivering higher value to the city.

–Steven Hellyer, IT Director

In the early days of cloud adoption, Everett was using Commvault software for protection of data on-premises. When Everett wanted to shift to leverage Microsoft Azure to reduce costs, infrastructure provisioning and management, Commvault’s ability to manage data across heterogenous systems provided a layer of protection to data stored in the cloud not available through Azure’s native toolset (to ensure data recovery and access). 

Everett’s next step was a migration from Microsoft Exchange to Office 365, but first the team needed to eliminate PST files and trim the size of its mailboxes in order to take that journey. Our email archiving capabilities enabled the necessary optimization.  Following a Commvault-assisted migration to Exchange Online, we worked closely with Everett to ensure the end-user experience and access to archived email was the same as it had been on-premises.

Everett also chose to implement Commvault Activate™ to improve its eDiscovery processes.  It made sense for it to leverage a single solution for backup, index and search of email and file system data, across its on-premises and cloud data. Commvault Activate enables customers to conduct searches on the archived data and execute Legal Hold.  It helps a lot with FOIA requests, which the city gets in volume. 

Data security is also important to the Everett, and it was keen to get in front of that task with a proactive approach to managing its most sensitive data. Turning again to Commvault Activate, it has been able to minimize the risks typically associated with sensitive data by ensuring it resides where it’s supposed to and is properly secured.  

There’s certainly more to tell, but I don’t want to give away all the good parts. Be sure to join Steven Hellyer and Kevin Walser, from the City of Everett, for an upcoming webinar presentation in which they’ll discuss how they used Commvault to provide protection and access to data in the cloud and cloud- native applications; and how they use the Sensitive Data Governance tool available in the Commvault Activate portfolio to manage security of high-risk data. A live Q&A will follow the session.

These are challenging times, but there are good stories to hear about and I’m glad to have shared one of them with you.

Sandra Hamilton is Commvault’s VP, Customer Success.