Protecting Critical Data In The Cloud

Oath, a Verizon subsidiary comprising the former Yahoo and AOL businesses, is a diverse company of more than 50 media and technology brands that engage more than 1 billion people worldwide. To gain new efficiencies, the former AOL had begun moving workloads to the cloud prior to the merger. As the newly formed Oath began to grow, the business decided to accelerate IT transformation by migrating more of its infrastructure to the cloud. “There was a big push to move to the cloud, to gain more flexibility and operational efficiency and find technology that was flexible enough for all Oath consumption models globally,” says Daniel Pollack, chief storage architect for Oath. The company decided on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud technology provider.

Oath’s current AWS presence is currently composed of:

• Over 100 accounts with consolidated billing
• ~500 VPC’s
• 40,000+ EC2 instances
• ~70PB of S3 storage

As Oath built out AWS infrastructure the team recognized the need for an extensible toolset to protect both their on-premise and cloud based IT infrastructures. “We have to protect all our internal and customer-facing data, and that means using the best data protection and backup software,” Pollack says. “However, we found that our old software was not economically viable anymore.”

Protecting Critical Business Data On-Premise And In The Cloud

By implementing Dell EMC Data Protection Solutions, Oath moved key workloads to the cloud without any business disruption. “We were able to move to the cloud seamlessly, with no impact to our end users across the globe, because of the capabilities of Dell EMC Data Protection Software. That made it very easy to follow the direction of the company as far as becoming more cloud-focused,” says Pollack. “About 10 percent of our infrastructure is on AWS now, and that migration was very simple.”

Reducing Software Costs By Nearly 70 Percent

Oath has achieved its goal of reducing data protection software costs. “We are only paying one-third of what we were paying before for data backup and protection by using Dell EMC Data Protection Software,” says Pollack. “In addition, we are seeing some operational efficiency gains in terms of managing the data protection and backup environment, so we expect further cost reductions.”

Improving Manageability And Flexibility

In addition to the management benefits of a single toolset, Oath is also able to more effectively protect data at remote sites around the world. Before moving to AWS Oath had constraints and cost associated with local IT presence, and dedicated WAN infrastructure between sites. Now Oath leverages AWS Direct Connect technology and EC2 instances running AWS editions of the technology they previously deployed on premise. The company can now more effectively protect remote data. Previously Oath had many backup appliances scattered across the globe. Since moving to a cloud based ecosystem using Dell EMC Data Protection Solutions on AWS, management of data protection has become significantly more efficient.

Finally, Oath has the flexibility it needs to respond quickly to business demands. “We have more agility and flexibility by being on the cloud, so we can quickly launch short-term solutions while maintaining service levels when we need to,” says Pollack. “Overall, we have reduced a lot of the risk and uncertainty related to the merger by implementing Dell EMC Data Protection Software.”

Conclusion

The needs of Oath required a robust, mature cloud provider at global scale, while leveraging a single, integrated toolset for data protection led Oath to an obvious decision – AWS & Dell EMC – Best of breed in the industry!