A high growth, cloud-based CRM vendor must invest continuously in the leading edge of IT infrastructure to keep its business humming. When annual customer and revenue growth exceeds 25 percent, year in and year out, that translates into a massive appetite for storage that must not only meet growth needs but evolve to handle increasing transaction rates and software complexity. Needless to say, with millions of users worldwide, reliability and security are also paramount considerations.
Born in the cloud, the company has always gone to extremes to secure and protect its customers’ data. It is part of their DNA, but it is also a statement to customers who at one time – and perhaps still today – might see the cloud paradigm as less secure than the traditional data center.
With this particular SaaS (Software as a Service) provider, data security is iron clad. Not just in the network, but right down to the individual disk drive.
That is why, from day one in the business’s relatively young life the company adopted a policy of retaining all storage media until cleansed of data to the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) 5220.22-M ECE seven-pass data sanitization standard. That’s right, seven overwrites with read-verification to assure that no customer data can be compromised.
It is a substantial commitment, particularly when considering the enormous expansion and churn in storage hardware that the company experiences to support its growth. For their chosen eradication vendor, Revert, it is a real test of expertise and scalability. Revert applies its eradication methodology to every system and every storage device.
This assures that systems and all their associated individual storage devices are safe to travel without fear of unauthorized access. And travel they must – at end of lease – to avoid significant charges from the systems vendor.
Multi-million dollar savings
How significant? In the past year alone the company would have incurred charges of $18 million had they been unable to eradicate their storage devices to the standard and return them intact. The return on their service investment was more than 30 times.
In order to keep their customer moving Revert must eradicate dozens of storage systems (and thousands of hard drives) per year, doing so in lock step with their customer’s aggressive technology refresh schedule. More specifically, in the past year alone Revert eradicated 22,892 storage devices (hard disk drives (HDDs), solid state disks (SSDs), and Hitachi Flash Module Drives (FMDs)) out of 76 Hitachi storage systems. Those storage systems included Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) 110, 150 and VM; Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage (AMS) 2500; Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP); and Hitachi VSP G Series 800 (G800).
To accomplish projects at such scale, Revert has developed the expertise to eradicate large storage arrays directly while they are still powered up and on the raised floor. Doing so enables the company to securely eradicate hundreds of drives simultaneously, and expeditiously clear the floor of storage arrays to make room for the new technology.
Moving to solid state storage
Because of increasing performance demands, the custom er is moving more of its information to the highest performance tier available today – solid state and flash storage. In particular, the company has made a large and growing investment in Hitachi Accelerated Flash (HAF). Strategically important, these devices are also considerably more expensive than conventional storage. All the more important that they can be eradicated and safely returned.
Fortunately, with Revert on their side, they know that eradication will be performed on the FMDs with the same rigor and care they have come to expect with HDDs and SSDs.
Revert has partnered with Hitachi to deliver an eradication methodology for FMDs that meets the high standards of this customer and exceeds internationally-recognized, published data sanitization guidelines and standards around the world.
You might say that this CRM company and Revert are a perfect fit. Both are geared to deliver cost-effective high performance to their respective customers with an unrelenting commitment to information security.