Optima Italia Secures Customer Data with Commvault Cloud Backup & Air Gap Protect Solution

About Optima Italia S.P.A

Optima Italia S.p.A (Optima) is a leading Digital Utility company that offers complete bundled services for energy (electricity and gas) and telecommunication (internet, telephone, and mobile) to business and consumer users. Through the partnerships with market leaders, such as Groupama and Europ Assistance, Optima also provides various insurance solutions (home, work, accident, third-party liability, and life insurance). Thanks to a pioneering business model, consolidated over the years and a staff of hundreds of young professionals, the company works daily on a unique mission: improving its customers’ life.

As customer information is critical to the business, Optima wanted to replicate its backup copies and store them outside the facility. This is to ensure the availability of data across multiple geographies and respond faster to recovery operation.

“Data protection is always a priority for Optima in terms of our strategic and regulatory point of view,” said Ugo Morra, IT Infrastructure Manager at Optima Italia. “The combination of Commvault and Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect provides us a security mechanism against cyberattacks and disaster recovery events.”

The challenge

Before Commvault, the backup and recovery process with Optima’s previous data protection product was slow and complex. The IT team had to take many steps to complete a recovery operation data, posing significant risk to the business.

After the migration of core information system to the private cloud, Optima adopted Commvault Cloud Backup & Recovery to keep up with its pace of innovation and support diverse workloads.

With increased risk of ransomware attacks and natural disasters, Optima wanted to further enhance the security of sensitive customer information. The business decided to expand its data protection strategy and look for a reliable and secure SaaS-based solution for data replication. The goal was to ensure compliance with GDPR regulatory requirements and support continuous growth of customer base and product portfolios.

The solution

When the support service for the legacy solution reached its expiry date, Optima switched to Commvault Cloud Backup & Recovery for primary backups in the on-premises environment, including SAP applications, Microsoft SQL databases, and 95% of its VMware virtual machines.

After using the Commvault solution for a few months, Optima was looking to deploy a Backup as a Service (BaaS) cloud storage target to further strengthen its ability to protect and recover data even in the event of a simple outage or hardware failure. Through the demo with Commvault team and the support from Commvault Partner, PCS Group, Optima immediately confirmed Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect could meet its needs due to its strong security posture in the cloud and seamless integration with Commvault technologies.

“We evaluated various vendors but Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect proved to be the most effective solution to align with our data protection strategy against ransomware,” said Morra. “With Commvault and Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect, we now have a single vendor for backup, replication, and distribution of data across various geographic locations.”

Optima currently uses Commvault Cloud Backup & Recovery for on-premises backups with a total of 180 TB of data, including 90 TB in each media agent installed in Naples and Milan. Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect is served as a replication tool for secondary backup copies, with approximately 70 TB of data in the cloud. Optima expects Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect to be fully operational in July 2021.

The results

According to Morra, one of the key benefits of using Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect is the ability to easily allocate and store data in a different and virtually-isolated location.

Thanks to the full integration with Commvault Cloud Backup & Recovery, Optima can now backup and quickly restore data in Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect via a single interface, the Commvault Command Center. This helped reduce the time to transfer terabyte of data to the cloud and improve RTO considerably.

“Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect is an essential tool in helping us to meet data protection compliance requirements,” said Morra. “The built-in air-gapped cloud security and data isolation capability with Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect ensures our customer data is secure and available if there is a ransomware attack or natural disaster.”

By using Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect, Optima also saved significant hardware costs to build an internal replication solution.

“Traditionally, we would have to buy a new server and implement an associated network for a replication tool. With Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect, we have completely avoided additional investments in infrastructure,” said Morra.

Optima plans to include the migration of services to the cloud when necessary and safeguard the entire core information system in the private cloud with Commvault and Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect.

“The combination of Commvault Cloud Backup & Recovery and Commvault Cloud Air Gap Protect gives us unlimited scalability in protecting our critical data, and benefits from ongoing support,” said Morra.