Challenges:
- Large volumes of sensitive financial data
- Affordable long term storage
- Compliance with industry
Solution:
- StoneFly Data Aware Cloud Archiving Solution
Results:
- Highly Scalable Cloud Storage
- Flexible/Cost Effective Payment Structure
- Compliant Cloud Archiving
- Automated and Simplified Data Management
Organization
A leading financial consulting service provider with thousands of enterprise customers in UK, US, and Europe.
Industry
Finance Services Industry
Requirements
As a financial consultant, the organization processed statistical financial data of their clients to help them with budget forecasting, profit and loss reporting, taxation, investment opportunities and other similar financial matters.
To help with the decision making process, they rely on state-of-the-art applications and programs. And these programs generate high volume of sensitive and often confidential data.
As is usually the case with the finance industry, the organization needed to retain this large volume of data for longer periods of time for compliance purposes and as per internal company policies.
However, with the growing clientage of the company, the financial data also grew to an extent which became difficult to accommodate on the on-premises hardware storage devices. The need for storage capacity grew far more than the available storage space. Consequently, the IT department became one of the major budget consuming departments for the organization.
Challenges
Being a finance company, they didn’t want their budget to be consumed solely by their IT department. They wanted the liberty to invest in their core operations. However, the terabytes of financial data that they needed to store and retain required a lot of storage space and they were looking into configuring more storage hardware for it; thus it didn’t look like they’d be able to reduce the costs at all.
The organization needed a robust, highly scalable and cost-effective storage solution which enabled terabytes to petabytes of data to be stored at an offsite, virtual, storage solution preferably cloud for longer periods of time.
As Brandon, the Head of IT department noted:
“We cannot afford to lose any of this data but keeping it on-site is expensive and it consumes a lot of resources. And for compliance reasons, we need to store it for years.”
Solution
StoneFly Data Aware Cloud Archiving Solution
StoneFly Data Aware Cloud Archiving Solution
StoneFly’s sales team and technical experts joined their heads to come up with the best possible solution for the financial consultant company’s data archiving challenge in an effective way.
Considering that the customer was looking for compliance, cost effective long term storage, and highly scalable storage, the StoneFly team conducted several sessions with the customer’s tech department to completely understand their requirements.
They concluded that the best choice for the finance company’s use-case was StoneFly’s Data Aware Cloud Archiving Solution.
The chosen solution produced the following results for the financial consulting service provider.
Results
The company was able to simplify their data archiving needs with the solution. As compared to the storage hardware, the cloud archiving solution greatly reduced the costs and delivered a better, more budget-friendly TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).
“It’s simple to use, it’s less expensive and we can automate the process; not to mention, we get to scale when we need to and we only pay for what we use. This solution has solved all of our archiving problems” – said Brandon
Furthermore, the cloud archiving solution delivered a number of benefits. Here’s a brief list of some of them:
Hardware Agnostic Cloud Archiving Software
The StoneFly cloud archiving solution is hardware agnostic. That means that it does not need dedicated hardware appliances and can run on most mainstream servers such as HPE, Dell, Nutanix, and many others.
“We didn’t need to purchase and setup any hardware. We installed the software, configured the cloud storage repositories and defined the policies that automatically transferred our archival data. The experience was simply convenient” said Jane, the DevOps engineer for the finance company.
Simplified & Automated Data Archiving
The IT environment was also able to free-up resources and simplify data archiving by leveraging the built-in automated tiering feature of the StoneFly cloud archiving solution.
“Instead of manually keeping an eye on every file or folder, the software does that for us. We’ve defined policies for when to transfer data to the archives and now it’s done automatically. This takes the hassle out of the entire archiving process” noted Jane.
Compliant Data Archiving Solution
As a financial consulting service provider, the company had to make sure that their archiving solution was compliant to a number of regulations including FINRA, Graham-Leach-Bliley Act, Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and others.
The cloud archiving solution helped them with the applicable compliance regulations by delivering a secure and reliable archiving solution in a secure cloud.