Department of the
Premier and Cabinet Protects Hybrid Cloud
with Commvault
and Metallic

About Department of the Premier and Cabinet, Western Australia

ICT services provided by the Department of the Premier and Cabinet (DPC) support over 1,100 users with varied business needs. When it came time for DPC to transition from using on-premises services to a combination of private government cloud services and the public cloud, DPC achieved this by using the GovNext buying contract and other available buying options.

“Risk management played a vital part in the next step we took to ensure our information remained highly secured in the event of a ransomware attack or catastrophic failure,” Giaros said. “Knowing the past reliability of the Commvault solution and having the in-house skills familiar with Commvault made it an easy transition to Metallic.”

The Challenge

With the transition to the private and public cloud, the primary objective was to ensure the integrity of archived mailbox data to the cloud was maintained, while providing seamless impact to operations and high reliability for retention and recovery.

DPC previously had a reliable experience with Commvault for backup, recovery and journal (indexed) information to meet discovery requests.

“Whilst there are many cloud backup services available, our requirements needed a solution that would encapsulate backup, recovery and email. Finding a single product rather than resorting to a combination of cloud services would reduce contract management and potentially provide operational overhead savings.” said Angelo Giaros, CIO, Department of the Premier and Cabinet Western Australia.

The Solution

After conducting a technical assessment of several suppliers, DPC selected the Metallic solution, which included Office 365 Backup, Database Backup, and File & Object Backup, to ensure ultimate security of data in the cloud and reduce management overheads.

“The key differentiator for Metallic was its ability to provide the same indexing capability as the Commvault solution for email journals,” Giaros said. “A single pane of glass with a consistent view of backups across all data and workloads was another major competitive differentiator. Through competitive assessment, Metallic was the product of choice.”

Following the transition of mailboxes to Metallic Office 365 Backup, DPC used Metallic Database Backup and Metallic File & Object Backup to protect its information.

“The systems team advised Metallic was simple to set up and manage, so we had no issues at all for the transition. And because it’s so efficient to use, we only required one person to manage the process,” said Giaros.

The Results

With Metallic’s stringent security protocols, zero trust access controls, and virtual air-gapped backup copies, it assures security is inherently maintained between File and Object, Database, O365 Emails, Microsoft Teams, and SharePoint Online information repositories.

“Metallic met all our requirements in terms of security and compliance. It has appropriately addressed concerns of being held ‘at ransom,’ and we can sleep comfortably, should a catastrophic event occur.” Giaros explained.

Metallic also offers unlimited cloud storage and retention, enabling DPC to remove the requirements of tape backups and offsite storage components, saving hardware costs and management overheads.

“Metallic just works, and it is a cost-effective solution,” Giaros said. “With increasing data volume and changing data retention policies, we feel confident that we will be able to scale with Metallic as we move forward with our cloud journey.”

In the past, DPC used segregated solutions to manage the backups for workloads and Sharepoint. With Metallic’s single pane of glass, DPC has seen a reduction in data management workloads, such as updating security across all workloads. The intuitive interface and dashboard also make it easy for system administrators to generate reports and monitor the status of backups and recovery in the hybrid cloud environment.

“Metallic is very simple to navigate with excellent reporting and eDiscovery capabilities, enabling us to deliver on search and compliance requirements,” Giaros said.

Giaros was also impressed with the overall experience from Commvault, in particular with their commitment and assistance in seeing the solution configured and delivered to immediately take advantage of licensing.

“Metallic gives us the assurance that we could meet all of our data protection requirements,” Giaros said. “Metallic does its job and does it well with at a good value for the money outcome.”