THE CLIENT:
Highly regulated customer with 2.1 petabytes of file shares and legacy Isilon storage; must retain certain data for up to 10 years. Over 90% of the customer’s budget associated with on-prem storage is storage maintenance. The customer faced challenges associated with a long-term cloud initiative, hoping to migrate as much as 80% of its data to the cloud to decrease its on-prem Isilon footprint. In addition to improving storage efficiency, the customer wants to strengthen internal policies and workflows to identify, store and/or delete sensitive data moving forward.
THEIR CHALLENGES:
- Finding a solution to connect directly to Isilon storage
- Migration cannot be completed without identifying all data that must be kept on-prem or deleted with a full audit trail
- Adherence to industry regulations as well as GDPR & CCPA
- Keeping the project within the proposed timeline to avoid going over budget
Without finding a new solution, the customer would have to increase their on-prem hardware footprint annually and would not be able to take full advantage of a cloud strategy. By not addressing compliance, regulatory demand, and risk the customer exposes itself to costly breaches and fines.
THE SOLUTION:
Classify360’s Isilon connector connected directly to the entire 2.1 petabyte dataset and provided a comprehensive view of the data the customer lacked using native application tools. The platform delivered near real-time data intelligence with GPU-enabled supervised and unsupervised machine learning to reduce false positives, noise, and the inevitable human intervention associated with “grey data.” Trainable decision tree technology established a predictable project cadence and provided near real-time classification and clustering.
RESULTS & BENEFITS:
- The customer’s data was classified and clustered based on a number of risk data types and properly tagged for secure archive, cloud migration, or deletion.
- The customer received a tangible, valuable outcome, not a snapshot of historical problems and a stalled, costly project. The project was completed on time and kept within budget.
- All 2.1 petabytes of data were scanned and analyzed, giving the customer complete confidence in its decisions
- The customer instantly deleted 23% of its data that was identified as redundant, obsolete, or trivial (ROT) and decommissioned hardware before putting it under support, reducing its support bill even further
- 31 terabytes (1.5% of data footprint) were marked as data that must be retained for audit purposes and kept in a secure repository on-prem, and an additional 42 terabytes (2% of data footprint) were identified as sensitive data that could not be migrated to the cloud
- Reduced hardware expense of $3.35 million over 3 years.
