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Case Studies
UNC Health Care Scales Security with Data Growth

How UNC Health Secures Patient Data While Cutting Backup Times in Half

Consolidating with Commvault, the health system scales security with data growth – helping save time, reduce risk, increase compliance, and bolster cyber resilience.

Healthcare industry compliancy

Cyber security for hybrid enterprises

Consolidated data protection

100%

Since moving to Commvault, UNC Health has achieved 100% data recoverability success.

50%

Commvault reduced backup times by half, enabling UNC Health to meet service-level agreements and perform frequent data backups.

1 Platform

By consolidating multiple backup solutions into Commvault, UNC Health streamlined their data protection infrastructure.

Challenge

Continuously growing data and applications taxed the small team
Beyond ensuring cyber resilience, data backup must meet compliance and patient data privacy requirements
Juggling multiple backup solutions – including Tivoli Storage Manager and Veeam – created complexity and increased risk

Solution

UNC Health chose Commvault as part of their backup and recovery and cyber resilience that would scale with acquisitions and increasing cloud use
Commvault (now Commvault® Cloud, formerly Metallic) goes beyond cloud-native data backup and provides vendor-agnostic coverage of their hybrid environment
UNC Health collaborates weekly with dedicated Commvault account managers to reinforce their data protection and efficiency
Commvault helps them stay compliant with healthcare industry regulations and strict internal guardrails

Results

Commvault cuts backup times in half, meeting service-level agreements and freeing the team to focus on optimizing data protection
UNC Health has achieved 100% recovery success
As the health system moves all backups to Commvault, they remain well-positioned to scale with data growth – helping save time, reduce risk, increase compliance, and bolster their ability to serve patients uninterrupted

Ensuring Data Availability

At UNC Health, the team oversees a big job: ensuring data recoverability for uninterrupted patient care. It’s a responsibility that expands by the day with data growing across thousands of systems and hundreds of locations.

“In healthcare, data doesn’t ever shrink – it just continues to grow,” said Clifton Whitehurst, HCS Systems Architect. “We change and add applications constantly, so we have to have a backup strategy and solutions in place.”

Beyond enabling cyber resilience in the event of an outage or loss, data backup must meet healthcare compliance and patient data privacy requirements.

Going Beyond Cloud-Native Data Protection

As North Carolina’s largest academic health system, UNC Health serves millions of patients annually.

When the health system sought to fortify its data protection strategy, consolidating from several solutions was paramount.

UNC Health chose Commvault Cloud for enterprise-grade protection that would scale with acquisitions and increasing cloud use. Critically, it would also go beyond cloud-native data protection.

“Just because you go to cloud does not guarantee data protection,” Whitehurst said. “In Commvault, we found a hardware-neutral vendor that isn’t tied to a single manufacturer. The ability to support multiple platforms is a positive compared to other solutions.”

Healthcare Cyber Security for a Hybrid Enterprise

At UNC Health, Commvault protects the hybrid environment.

Currently, the team is also working to extend Commvault to protect Epic, their electronic health records (EHR) software.

“Cloud backups stay in the cloud. That’s one less headache for us,” Whitehurst said.

Keeping Up with Healthcare Industry Regulations

Commvault also helps UNC Health keep data retention, security, and privacy compliant with healthcare industry regulations and internal guardrails. It encrypts data in transit and at rest, helping protect sensitive patient and operational data from unauthorized access. Then, role-based access controls ensure that only authorized personnel can access or manage backups.

Backups also remain immutable, preserving data integrity. Moreover, Commvault comes with built-in auditing and reporting tools for visibility into backup and recovery activities and easier compliance with HIPAA and other healthcare-specific regulations.

Fine-tuning UNC Health’s backup strategy has taken some time and thought, but Commvault has been there to help. As a Commvault customer, UNC Health collaborates weekly with a dedicated account manager to resolve any open issues, plan new projects, ensure ongoing compliance, and discuss strategy to maintain its cyber resilience and efficiency.

“Commvault plays an important part in modernizing our backups, customizing the solution for our environment, and facilitating it all,” Whitehurst said. “The people at Commvault have been great to work with and have been with us every step of the way. It’s a good relationship.”

Consolidating Data Protection with Commvault

UNC Health has chosen to enhance its enterprise-wide data protection with Commvault.

“Commvault has become a critical part of the UNC Health infrastructure” Whitehurst said.

They reduce the time, complexity, and risk of managing multiple solutions and boost their ability to respond quickly to outages or attacks. So far, that has meant exceptional recoverability.

“As long as we know where a file is and how long ago we need to go back, we’ve hit 100% recovery success,” Whitehurst said.

With built-in compression and data deduplication, Commvault also expedites backup times, freeing the team to focus on optimizing data protection.

“We’re backing up in half the time it took before, so we can do more backups now,” Whitehurst said. “We’re also meeting our service-level agreements for backups, so that’s a positive.”