Harel Group simplifies
its cloud journey with Commvault and Metallic

About Harel Group

Harel Insurance Investments & Financial Services Ltd. (Harel Group) is the largest and the most innovative insurance company in Israel. It offers a comprehensive range of products and services—including health insurance, life and non-life insurance, pension funds, and portfolio management—to over 10 million customers. With 80 years of experience in the industry, Harel Group is now listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and has over 22% market share in terms of premiums. Its goal is to deliver a superior experience to customers, agencies, and employees by treating them with respect and as a family unit.

As the top insurance and financial services provider in the country, Harel Group manages a large volume of data and investment money. Ensuring all that data is 100% backed up and can be restored without any issues is critical.

Over the last seven years, Harel Group has used Commvault Complete™ Data Protection to back up and restore data for its entire on-premises environment, including 3,500 physical and virtual servers, 15 Oracle databases, 250 Microsoft SQL servers, MongoDB, and IBM AS400 as core business applications. After adopting Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365, the company was looking for a Backup as a Service (BaaS) solution that was also delivered and consumed in the cloud.

“We wanted a BaaS solution that we know we can trust and implement quickly without additional burden on our staff. Metallic Backup for Microsoft 365 and Metallic Cloud Storage Service give us this capability,” said David Ben-Eli, System IT Infrastructure Manager, Harel Group.

The Challenge

Harel Group had been using the Commvault solution to reliably protect over 1.5PB of data in the on-premises environment. Due to the stringent industry regulatory requirements, its business model would not allow any data to be stored in the public cloud without the ability to back up securely and easily restore it.

In the past two years, Harel Group has moved part of its infrastructure to Microsoft Azure, including Microsoft 365. Ben-Eli needed to ensure the data in the cloud could be protected and rapidly recovered as easily and reliably as their on-premises data.

“A SaaS solution takes care of data availability, but not the backup operation of the data,” said Ben-Eli. “We knew from day one that in taking on Microsft 365, we would need a BaaS solution with good restore functionality that satisfies our business model and strategy.”

The Solution

With years of positive experience from its partnership with Commvault, the adoption of Metallic Backup for Microsoft 365 and Metallic™ Cloud Storage Service was a logical move for the insurer.

“Commvault has good products, development, and services. When they launched a fully managed BaaS solution with Microsoft Azure, it was attractive to our business model,” said Ben-Eli. “After evaluating various products, only Commvault and Metallic gave us a total solution to fulfill our business demands and compliance rules.”

Deploying Metallic Backup for Microsoft 365 was fast and easy. The first stage was to protect approximately 1,000 mailboxes, which took just few weeks to complete. Harel Group expects to cover over 5,000 mailboxes by end of the year.

In addition, Harel Group implemented Metallic™ Cloud Storage Service to drive on-premises storage to the cloud. This helped to minimize infrastructure cost and mitigate the risk of ransomware attacks. Harel Group also plans to back up SAP HANA later in the year.

The Results

According to Ben-Eli, the key benefit of using Commvault and Metallic is the ease of adopting data protection in the cloud, without sacrificing security or performance.

“Whatever new technology we adopted in our data center, we know that Commvault can support that technology. This gives us reassurance that we could back up any data without complexity,” said Ben-Eli.

With Metallic Backup for Microsoft 365, Harel Group now has the ability to easily back up, store, and restore data on demand, including mailboxes, policy documents, insurance claims, and communications within Teams. By adding Metallic™ Cloud Storage Service to drive backups to the cloud, the company can reduce further infrastructure costs and improve security stature.

The IT team can also quickly generate reports from Metallic to monitor its status. This significantly cut the time needed to manage the infrastructure and freed up the IT team to focus on business benefits, such as improving services to customers and agents.

“Our data is growing extremely fast. Without Metallic, we had to employ at least two people to manage the infrastructure for storage space, media storage, and backup servers,” said Ben-Eli. “Now with Metallic, we have a peace of mind that our data is secure. There is also a cost benefit for the business as the entire cost for Metallic is less than the cost of hiring more people.”

Another benefit for using Metallic is its increased confidence working with SaaS solutions in general. This allowed Harel Group to go to the market faster and expand to other solutions as business required.

“The combination of high security, ease of use, and fast deployment is the key factor for why Metallic won the race,” said Ben-Eli.

Ben-Eli was also impressed with the support and service level agreement from Commvault. He noted that the maturity of Commvault products enables Harel Group to enjoy the same reliability and performance of data protection in the cloud.

Unlike other competitors that offer broad workload support but require multiple disparate applications to make it happen, Harel Group can now manage all the workloads, in the cloud or on-premises, through a single solution.

“We have been with Commvault for seven years, and we never had an issue whenever we wanted to restore data,” said Ben-Eli. “The simplicity and scalability of Commvault and Metallic solutions empower us to protect diverse workloads via a single pane of glass without deploying multiple applications.”