Fortune Brands Innovation Achieves 73% Cost Savings with Unified Data Protection

Consolidating Fragmented Protection Across Multiple Brands

Fortune Brands faced a critical challenge common to companies with multiple business units. “Driven by recent acquisitions and mergers, we were running multiple data protection software solutions. Even within a business unit itself, there could have been multiple solutions and overlap in our data protection,” explains Lee, Principal Infrastructure Architect responsible for global data protection.

Operating two main datacenters and 10 distribution centers across the USA, Fortune Brands’ infrastructure included an on-premises VMware environment, SAP with pRDM, Azure Cloud workloads, Microsoft 365, and NetApp storage integration.

The situation became untenable. Fortune Brands decided to move away from Avamar entirely due to critical limitations, including a lack of hybrid cloud capabilities, no immutable backup copies for ransomware protection, inconsistent backup posture across global locations, limited centralized management and reporting, and network bandwidth challenges at remote distribution centers.
“We had challenges with multiple data protection technologies, no central admin plane, and unreliable offsite data protection replication. Each business unit had a different data protection software, protection policies, and recovery procedures,” Lee recalls. The organization needed a modern, proven solution that could align with their long-term strategy while solving immediate operational challenges.

Architecting the Right-Sized Solution for Every Location

Fortune Brands Innovation deployed a tiered Commvault architecture designed to meet the specific needs of each location. For Moen, their largest business, they chose HyperScale X. ” HyperScale X was a scalable solution that enabled node-based growth and delivered the performance needed to support our largest environments,” Lee explains.

However, a critical gap existed for smaller, regional locations. “There was a big gap in between HyperScale X and the remote appliances. That’s where we were looking for the HyperScale Edge product to help fill that gap. Specifically to size a solution that was cost effective for our business for those in-between sizes, where deploying a three-node HyperScale X system was not”

HyperScale Edge solved this challenge. “We were deploying Commvault on virtual media agents attached to NAS storage to protect it, which worked well, but it was not a hardened system and it depended on VMware and other outside forces to do its data protection. By moving to HyperScale Edge using Commvault’s reference architecture, we were able to size this storage appropriately for the workload it was protecting.”

Enabling Consistent, Secure Resilience Operations For Distributed Team

The security benefits were equally important. “And the security on top of it, brings the whole solution together. Not being able to access it via SSH unless you go into Commvault and enable connectivity into it is a great security feature that we use to harden our data protection platform.” Commvault’s HyperScale solutions delivered built-in security controls, including proactive anomaly detection, comprehensive RBAC control and audit, hardened SE Linux systems, and lifecycle security with deduplication, encryption, and verification throughout the data lifecycle. “The built-in resiliency and advanced ransomware protection have given us the peace of mind that our critical data is always protected and recoverable.” To further strengthen resilience, Fortune brands implemented Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect, providing off-site, air-gapped, and immutable copies of data.

By moving to a unified data protection platform, IT and Security teams gained a simpler way to enforce consistent resilience policies, standardize governance controls, and support compliance across distributed environments. The implementation delivered comprehensive capabilities, including a single management console for both on-premises and Azure environments, centralized reporting and alerting across all locations, and a globally consistent backup posture. Deep integration with NetApp and Microsoft, seamless hybrid cloud support, and a flexible architecture designed for low-bandwidth remote sites helped overcome critical network and operational challenges. The solution protected M365 SaaS in alignment with Microsoft’s Shared Responsibility Model, SAP with pRDM, and delivered end-to-end backup, recovery, and archive capabilities.
For cyber resilience, Fortune Brands implemented Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect providing offsite, air-gapped, and immutable copies, advanced security controls including proactive anomaly detection, hardened SE Linux systems, comprehensive RBAC control and audit, and lifecycle security with deduplication, encryption, and verification throughout the data lifecycle. “The built-in resiliency and advanced ransomware protection have given us the peace of mind that our critical data is always protected and recoverable.”

Delivering Measurable Business Impact and Operational Excellence

Fortune Brands achieved $19.4M in savings in the first year, followed by $1.7M in years 2 and 3, totaling $22.8M with a 9.8-month ROI and a 73% cost reduction compared to their previous approach.
Operationally, the improvements were significant. Daily reviews that once required looking across more than 20 backup consoles were consolidated into a single dashboard, enabling faster resolution through centralized logging and management. “Recovery times have improved due to faster HyperScale infrastructure instead of inexpensive JBOD storage. Reliability has been the biggest improvement—better tools to see missed systems and much better replication across multiple copies,” Lee notes.

The deployment model also proved highly effective. Media agents could be placed onsite for local backups and then upload to Air Gap Protect for offsite copies, with compression and dedupe helping optimize performance at bandwidth-limited sites. The ability to generate dashboards and reports improved how leadership validated protection and recovery plans.

Flexibility was a key differentiator. “One of the big selling points was the ability to write anywhere—virtual media agents, NAS devices, and more. Competitors often require writing to their own appliance,” Lee explains. Deployment was straightforward as well: “It’s a pre-built system. Deploy an ISO image, run the wizard, join the CommCell, and start protecting data. It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s reliable.”
Commvault Cloud scales to support businesses as they grow and the obstacles and threats change. As Lee puts it, “As technology evolves, Commvault seems to stay ahead of the competition by delivering the right tools.”