Clal Insurance improves efficiency and lowers
costs with Commvault

Simplifying backup infrastructure to support growth

Part of the Clal Group, Clal Insurance is one of the largest insurance companies in Israel. It offers a wide range of products and services—such as non-life insurance, health insurance and long-term savings—to private and corporate customers via 2,000 insurance agents. Clal Insurance aims to become a leader in Israel’s market by striving for excellence while leading a digital revolution enabling anywhere, anytime service.

As an insurer, Clal Insurance is required to keep its data for long periods and be able to prove to its regulator that it can quickly recover its data. “We almost cannot delete anything,” Haim Inger, CTO, Clal Insurance explained. “Data for policies and claims could live for tens of years.”

Clal Insurance was using Veritas NetBackup and EMC Avamar as its backup systems for the last 10 years, but these products had no self-service functions or capability to integrate with the public cloud. With the company’s data growing to more than 2PB and the migration of its CRM systems to the cloud over the next year, Inger wanted to simplify Clal Insurance’s backup infrastructure and use a single solution to manage backups for on-premises and cloud environments.

“We evaluated various solutions but Commvault came out on top in terms of its quality and pricing. The seamless integration with NetApp storage system also made it simple to fulfill our business requirements,” said Inger.

Improving developers’ productivity and slashing disk costs by 70%

Clal Insurance has around 200 developers and each one needed to restore data for their development environment across 300 systems every day. Before Commvault, this process could take up to three hours as developers had to open a ticket with the system team to restore their data.

“Thanks to the self-service functions with Commvault Complete Data Protection, the waiting time was completely gone. Developers can now immediately restore data without depending on an individual or department,” said Inger.

Commvault Complete Data Protection also gives the flexibility for Inger and his team to reduce total cost of ownership by using less expensive disks as target backup instead of locking in with a specific vendor.

“By combining Commvault Complete Data Protection with NetApp storage, we slashed the disk cost per terabyte by almost 70% compared to the previous Veritas NetBackup and EMC Avamar solutions,” said Inger. “Now we have a reliable and cost-effective backup solution to protect against cyber attacks, thanks to Commvault and NetApp.”

Meeting Industry Compliance Needs

With stringent data security requirements in the insurance industry, Clal Insurance needed to ensure its data is secure and available.

“The built-in reporting capabilities with Commvault are simple and self-explanatory. This allows us to quickly create audit reports and prove to our regulators that our data is backed up and can be restored quickly,” said Inger.

After choosing the Commvault solution, Clal Insurance planned to start the project in early 2020 but the COVID-19 pandemic put this timing into question. That’s why Commvault Partner Emet Barmor helped Clal Insurance manage the entire project remotely to meet its timeframe.

“Thanks to the guidance and expertise from Emet Barmor, we successfully completed the project close to the original timeframe—even with the lockdown situation,” said Inger.

“I would recommend to anyone to just go for Commvault because it is easy to use and works reliably,” Inger said. “You will sleep much better!”