RTO DISASTER RECOVERY CASE STUDY: POSSIBLENOW

PossibleNOW leverages powerful technology and industry-leading expertise to enable companies to listen to customers, remember what they like and dislike and respond in useful, personalized ways. 

The PossibleNOW enterprise preference management platform, MyPreferences, collects customer and prospect preferences, stores them safely and makes them available to any other system or application in the enterprise. PossibleNOW strategic services experts identify opportunities, plan technology deployments, design preference collection interfaces and position clients for a win.

As a technology-driven organization, PossibleNOW is focused on IT innovation. So, when its traditional tape backup processes were consuming valuable IT staff time, PossibleNOW needed to make a change. Further, its tape backup infrastructure wasn’t giving the company’s executive team the confidence it needed, that valuable data could be recovered in the event of a downtime event.

PossibleNOW is in the business of mitigating compliance risk. As such, business continuity and security are of particular importance. Supporting customers in heavily regulated markets, they have very specific, and critical data protection requirements. While a fully managed backup solution was what PossibleNOW wanted, it couldn’t be provided by just any managed service provider. It needed to be supported by the best: a provider with impeccable compliance and security layers to ensure that data wasn’t just protected, but geo-secure and rapidly recoverable, come what may.

PossibleNOW had a 15-minute recovery time objective (RTO) service level agreement (SLA) it must meet for its half-a-petabyte of customer data. But aging hardware and complex processes were standing in their way.

“We performed an evaluation of how successful our backups were over time, and the grades weren’t close to what we wanted,” said Steve Haley, Director of Technical Operations, PossibleNOW. “Old hardware and other contributing factors were causing low marks in reliability. We needed to rearchitect our environment. That’s when we created a mandate to get off our tape backup hardware and upgrade to a more stabilized infrastructure.”

Among the criteria was that the solution should support its existing Commvault software which the company had used with success in their tape-based environment. But PossibleNOW also wanted to be geo-secure, with backups performed in different geographies for greater recovery and protection, plus they wanted assurance they could meet their 15-minute RTO SLA.

“In our business, where we collect and consolidate customer communication preferences and consent across the enterprise for a range of large organizations, compliance is absolutely critical. We wanted to implement a public cloud-based data protection solution that offered encryption and key management to ensure our managed backup compliance.”

-Steve Haley, Director of Technical Operations, PossibleNOW

To modernize its backup environment and meet its SLA and compliance criteria, PossibleNOW turned to its trusted IT solution provider, Verinext. Already convinced of their expertise during previous projects, including a large data center migration that was flawlessly performed, PossibleNOW couldn’t fathom looking anywhere else. Verinext had been a long-time partner of Commvault and uses Commvault backup software at the core of its managed backup service. Even more, Verinext has deep expertise in security and governance best practices – everything PossibleNOW needed to assure that its data would be compliantly protected.

Verinext migrated PossibleNOW’s data as well as its Commvault licensing and delivered the managed backup service they needed to ensure compliance and business continuity with true peace of mind. The data was migrated with ease and additional security layers were added to further protect the data in a public cloud infrastructure. To support PossibleNOW’s compliance requirements, Verinext built the solution to offer data encryption, in flight and at rest, with key management technology that delivered an added layer of compliance and security.

Today, PossibleNOW no longer has to worry about backups and data protection. This has given them exponentially more time to focus on other strategic technology initiatives.

By having Verinext fully manage all their backup services – from the hardware maintenance to protection and recovery processes – PossibleNOW is confident it can easily meet its 15-minute RTO without having to give it a second thought.

“We now have full confidence that we can recover anything from the past three years, quicker and more reliably than we ever thought possible. The issues we have avoided are the win. We have completely moved from a reactive to a proactive stance when it comes to our data protection. And, it’s all thanks to Verinext.

 —Steve Haley, Director of Technical Operations, PossibleNOW