Sony Slashes Cyber Costs by 80% with Commvault Cloud for Enhanced Security

Sony Strengthens Cyber Resilience with Commvault Cloud

Sony sought a unified cyber resilience platform, finding it with Commvault Cloud, enhancing threat detection and reducing costs. 

Protecting data from today’s villains 

The Walkman. PlayStation. The blockbuster Spider-Man series. For decades, Sony has turned out hit after hit across electronics, gaming, and entertainment.  

As Sony creators pursue their next significant innovations, the Data Center Services team works behind the scenes to protect company data from today’s villains. 

For the team, fortifying the enterprise takes knowledge and data protection tools that mesh with their cloud and data center environments and align with their internal security policies, service-level agreements, and international compliance demands such as GDPR – a challenging mix to find. 

“Our strategy is to connect globally from our data centers to our cloud solution,” says Cassandra Cinar, Senior Director, Data Center Services. “To achieve that, we need a unified platform for recovery across cloud, on-premises, and software-as-a-service workloads.” 

Checking all the boxes with Commvault 

In its hunt for a complete cyber resilience solution, Sony explored Rubrik and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager before global standardization with Commvault Cloud. 

“The key differences among security solutions lie in their deployment and recovery capabilities,” Cinar says. “Commvault’s robust and comprehensive infrastructure satisfies all our needs for recovery, service-level agreements, and crucial functionalities like threat detection and other security features.” 

Critically, Commvault’s automated data security and management functionalities help Sony comply with the company’s internal financial systems, as well as SOC and GDPR requirements. 

With its partner, Accenture, Sony rolled out Commvault to virtually all AWS users – with 5,000 endpoints across multiple data centers, regions, locations, and cloud providers. That coverage spans its diverse multi architecture environment, which includes everything from Cisco to IBM and SAN and NAS storage. 

Comprehensive threat detection and remediation

At Sony, Commvault handles both short- and long-term data protection needs and replicates its on-premises environment in AWS. 

For threats, a layered defense against ransomware goes beyond simple anomaly detection and helps minimize the impact of cyberattacks. That includes early warning and threat scanning, remediation, intelligent quarantining, and clean recovery validation. 

Commvault goes head-to-head against attackers by leveraging threat intelligence censors to identify new threats. With it, Sony can find zero-day threats that have already impacted backup data – enabling them to quarantine and recover more quickly. 

Sharpening visibility organization-wide, regular health checks help pinpoint strengths or opportunities for improvement – automation that saves time, Cinar notes. Commvault CommCell servers alert the team to the why behind failures and offer ideas to improve. 

“Threat Scan’s ability to scan backup data for threats is invaluable because it proactively identifies and neutralizes certain viruses and threats that may originate from our G Suite or be reported by our security incident response team, preventing potential outages,” Cinar says. 

Commvault’s quarterly Risk Analysis also helps meet compliance requirements and implement the necessary controls for immediate security policy action. 

Cutting total cost of ownership by approximately 80% 

A global web of protection with Commvault gives Sony peace of mind for less cost:

• Reduced recovery point objective (RPO) – Sony reduces its RPO time. 
• Faster threat detection – The company recognizes threats sooner. 

“Commvault has helped not only decrease our threat detection time but also improve threat prevention to such an extent that we often avoid facing the full impact of a threat altogether,” Cinar says. “By preventing these incidents, the benefit is clear: we don’t need to activate disaster recovery mechanisms.” 

• Less downtime – Sony reduces downtime for greater business continuity. 

“Preventative measures against outages limit their impact on customers, thereby maintaining near-perfect SLAs,” Cinar says. “This translates to increased customer satisfaction and minimal business disruption, which constitutes our return on investment.” 

• Lower total cost of ownership – Data management costs bring down the company’s cost of ownership by approximately 80%, after factoring in encryption and compression and thanks to the move to disk-based and cloud storage in AWS and Azure. Older data resides on less-expensive storage for more cost-effective long-term retention. Moreover, a subscription-based license allows them to tailor spending to actual usage

“Commvault Cloud’s stability and cost-effectiveness have solidified its position as our preferred choice,” Cinar adds.