How OpenText minimized data risk during the pandemic
When a company’s global workforce transitioned to remote work almost overnight, it looked to a recent acquisition to help safeguard critical data.
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OpenText acquired Carbonite and Webroot in December 2019, helping expand the company’s cyber resilience portfolio and strengthening its comprehensive information management offering. As it happens, the acquisition could not have come at better time. By the end of March 2020, 98% of OpenText’s global workforce of more than 14,000 had pivoted to remote work due to COVID-19. OpenText, like so many others, had to adapt to the new normal and find a way to protect the data and devices that were now well beyond the company network and firewall.
The challenge in the ‘new normal’
OpenText needed a way to automatically back up all critical data and protect it from everything from ransomware attacks and malicious insiders, to the more mundane device failures and everyday IT issues. Previous backup implementations relied on employees to save their own work. And data saved on devices like laptops was typically the only copy, creating a single-point-of-failure situation.
For long-term data storage, such as after an employee left the company, OpenText relied on USB hard drives to copy the data and keep it stored. However, the dramatic shift to remote made this approach unrealistic.
Practicing what you preach- An internal transformation
To better protect the dispersed endpoints that had proliferated so rapidly, OpenText turned to its newly acquired enterprise-grade cloud backup solution, Carbonite Endpoint. This solution offers the backup and recovery capabilities OpenText needed to secure its vast workforce, and it could be deployed globally as it satisfied strict global and regional data privacy requirements, including GDPR.
For even greater security, the deployment team opted to leverage the power, scalability and security of Microsoft Azure. To ensure a seamless rollout of the backup solution to more than 13,000 devices globally, the team decided to have single URL to administer all machines. This centralized management allowed for complete auditing and reporting, while monitoring data going into the cloud, all remotely.
Due to the sheer volume of endpoints and out of an abundance of caution, OpenText opted to stagger its deployment to about 1,000 endpoints a day. The team also left a couple of days between deployments to ensure any issues that came up could be addressed.
On the backend, OpenText configured Carbonite Endpoint to automate the backup process, making onboarding new employees easy. As a result, the solution runs silently in the background and scans for changes every 15 minutes. After the initial complete backup, the solution continuously sends new data to the vault, ensuring new work will not be lost.
Driving Operational Resiliency
Since deploying Carbonite Endpoint, OpenText’s IT team gained back hundreds of hours previously spent on manual installs and restores. Within the first five months of deployment, 200 data restores were needed and the solution ensured they were completed almost instantly.
Product features like legal hold and the ability manage and recover data remotely ensured both data compliance and business continuity. The ability to manage backups and restores from the console also allows IT to more easily support team members in other countries.
Ultimately, the improved backup system acts as an insurance policy for peoples’ work, providing OpenText employees with the confidence that they will never be in a position where they can’t access a document or file again. OpenText privacy and compliance teams know that OpenText company data is being stored and managed securely. Finally, leadership and the IT team demonstrated the value of accelerating digital transformation to be more successful in the hybrid/remote work environment that is here to stay.
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