Powering Data Protection Revolution for a Leading Healthcare Payer
Overview
A leading healthcare payer aimed to modernize and simplify its data protection landscape to keep pace with rapid growth and evolving regulatory requirements. The client sought faster, more reliable restores, long-term data archiving for more than a decade and a seamless way to retire complex, high-cost legacy environment. Partnering with HCLTech, the organization implemented Commvault integrated with AWS Cloud —enhancing business continuity, improving operational efficiency and reducing storage costs across both on-prem and cloud environments.
The challenge
Escaping a costly, unstable legacy backup estate
Operating in a highly regulated healthcare sector, the client recognized the need to modernize its fragmented, multi-vendor backup environment to enhance resilience and minimize operational risk.
Over time, the legacy setup had become inefficient and difficult to manage, driving up cost and limiting visibility into critical healthcare data protection workflows. Backup copies were distributed across multiple storage tiers, including primary, secondary and tertiary repositories on both disk and tape systems, creating unnecessary complexity and risk.
Key transformation drivers included:
- Optimizing storage utilization and reducing operational costs by eliminating tape libraries and associated off-site movement expenses
- Streamlining backup and replication across a multi-vendor environment
- Strengthening policy, tooling and governance to ensure SLA compliance, stability and robust ransomware protection
- Enhancing data protection coverage and recovery efficiency for healthcare systems and claims data
- Establishing standardized best practices and documentation for greater transparency and control
Vision
A scalable, cloud-enabled platform with centralized control
The client envisioned retiring tape-based processes and transitioning to a unified, cloud-hosted data protection model. The vision focused on scalability, centralized visibility and long-term retention, delivered through a trusted transformation partnership with HCLTech.
Key vision elements included:
- A scalable solution capable of accommodating current and future data sets with long-term retention requirements
- A centralized view of data management and protection across environments
- Seamless access to archived data for end users
- A strategic transformation partner to help redefine the client’s data management strategy
- Rapid restore capability and monthly restoration drills to verify data integrity, validate recovery processes and strengthen organizational cyber resilience, disaster recovery readiness and overall cybersecurity posture
The solution
Executing the transformation with HCLTech
To bring this vision to life, HCLTech modernized the client’s data protection architecture using Commvault, safeguarding approximately 4 PB of highly confidential, business-critical data across both on-prem and AWS Cloud.
Unified, tapeless data protection
Moving away from fragmented tools and manual tape handling, the client standardized on Commvault to unify backup and archiving across diverse platforms.
- Implemented Commvault as the primary platform for backup and archiving across SQL, Oracle and DB2 databases, as well as AIX, Windows, VMware and NAS storage environments
- Enabled efficient protection of NAS with rapid recovery options to minimize downtime
- Optimized storage costs by leveraging Commvault Activate for complete data visibility, classification of redundant or sensitive data and automation of management actions
- Eliminated reliance on physical tapes by adopting a fully tapeless system that replicates data and applications from on-prem locations to AWS public cloud infrastructure
Cloud-first integration and consistency
HCLTech aligned the client’s protection framework with a cloud-first strategy, ensuring consistent governance, compliance and visibility across the data landscape.
- Leveraged Commvault’s cloud native features to support a scalable, cloud-first architecture
- Extended on-prem data management practices to the cloud through unified governance and consistent data protection policies
Operational simplicity and continuity
Centralized management and automated workflows replaced manual, error-prone processes, increasing reliability and enabling seamless change.
- Replaced a patchwork of tools with single-console visibility for complete insight into the backup environment
- Enabled seamless data migration to a new data center without risking data loss
- Supported site-level recovery and random restores at file, virtual server, database and filesystem levels
The impact
Stability, speed and savings at scale
The transformation delivered measurable improvements in stability, compliance and cost efficiency, demonstrating the value of a unified, cloud-integrated data protection platform.
Stability and recovery outcomes
- Established a highly stable environment with all backup jobs completing successfully
- Maintained a 100% backup success rate over the past 72 hours
- Achieved reliable site-level recovery and consistent restores across files, virtual servers, databases and filesystems
Cost and efficiency gains
- Reduced the nightly backup window by 50%, improving data availability timelines
- Delivered significant cost savings through high deduplication and compression ratios
- Achieved approximately 80% reduction in costs by eliminating tape purchases and off-site retention expenses
- Migrated legacy legal data to the cloud for secure, long-term retention
- Implemented optimal archive solutions through seamless Commvault–AWS integration
Centralized control and compliance
- Single-console management providing a unified, enterprise-wide view of data protection
- Data compressed, deduplicated and encrypted before cloud replication, in line with industry and regulatory standards
- Consistent governance policies applied across on-prem and cloud environments for protection and compliance
Conclusion
By replacing a complex, fragile and costly legacy backup estate with a Commvault-powered, cloud-integrated solution, the client achieved a stable, compliant and future-ready data protection posture. The transformation simplified operations, accelerated protection workflows, retired approximately 220,000 legacy tapes, resulting in substantial cost savings. With a cloud-first foundation now in place, the organization is well-positioned to scale securely and efficiently — ensuring resilient protection for mission-critical healthcare data across both on-prem and AWS environments.
