Yediot Information Accelerates Speed of Recovery and Ensures Business Continuity with Commvault and Metallic

About Yediot Information Technologies

Yediot Information Technologies (yit) specializes in providing full digital services – including UX/UI design, web development, content management systems, mobile solutions, and full data center hosting services – for major media companies and content producers in Israel. With 170 experts in the field, yit creates and manages Ynet, one of the largest news websites in the country, and publishes newspapers and magazines.

To support continuous growth, yit wanted to bring the best technology to the business and deliver innovative and timely services to more people around the world. One of its strategic goals is to migrate ‘Ynet’ from on-premises to the cloud over the next two years.

“It wasn’t easy to move the website, which was built on-premises over the last 15 years,” said Eytan Molle, System Manager, Yediot Information Technologies. “With Commvault and Metallic, we are confident that the transition to the cloud is seamless and our data for the website can be quickly recovered if needed. This helps us ensure the continuity of time-sensitive publishing business.”

The Challenge

Over the past eight years, yit used Commvault Complete Data Protection to back up various workloads, such as Exchange mailboxes, Oracle databases, Microsoft SQL, SharePoint, Active Directory, and 700 virtual machines. It would then copy the data on tapes and store them in a remote location for up to seven years. But recovering archived data through the tape-based approach could take days, negatively impacting the speed to respond to publishing requests.

With the move to Microsoft 365 mailboxes, yit wanted a SaaS-based solution to protect the entire Microsoft 365 environment, including 1,500 mailboxes, Teams, and One Drive, and also to gain the flexibility to easily expand to other workloads in the future.

The Solution

Due to its positive experience using Commvault Complete Data Protection for its on-premises environment, yit selected Metallic Microsoft 365 Backup to protect 1,000 mailboxes as the first step of its cloud strategy and will gradually expand to 1,500 mailboxes. It will consider using Metallic for other workloads, such as Oracle Database and videos data in Amazon S3 – which are currently still using Commvault to back up the data – when the business has fully adopted the cloud over the next few years.

“Having a reliable and flexible data-management-as-a-service solution that could support our publishing business is critical,” said Molle. “Metallic is secure, safe, and convenient. We can easily recover data without any issues.”

The transition to Metallic was also quick and easy. Within three hours of installation, Molle and his team started backing up mailboxes. “Metallic works very nicely since we first deployed the solution. You don’t have to learn anything new and it met our data retention requirements,” said Molle.

The Results

Through the automation with Commvault, yit can easily back up and store most archived data (except for video data in Amazon S3) on disks instead of tapes. This eliminates the time IT staff spent finding the correct tape and transporting it from the warehouse whenever there was a need to recover data.

By adding Metallic Microsoft 365 Backup, yit has further reduced the time to recover data and responded faster to publishing requests, such as restoring an article published in the newspapers two years ago.

“Now, with Metallic, we can fully recover Microsoft 365 data in just a few minutes instead of days,” said Molle.

With an integrated dashboard, IT staff can easily manage their installed and cloud backups and ensure business continuity.

“Thanks to Commvault and Metallic, there is now only one person rather than two persons involved in backup and recovery. Staff no longer need to work on a Sunday night and it just makes their life so much easier,” said Molle.

The reliability of Commvault and Metallic also gives Molle peace of mind that their data is available and they can prevent ransomware attacks, whether the data lives on-premises or in the cloud.

“I would recommend Commvault and Metallic without any hesitation. You can forget about backups and sleep better at night,” said Molle.