Kraft Boosts Data Protection Environment
The Kraft Group – a holding company whose expansive range of operating units includes companies in the professional sports, manufacturing, and real estate development industries – is reaching its data protection goals by using advanced technology to change the way it does business.
“Our investment in technology, and particular solutions from Dell Technologies, allows us to provide real-time data, real-time information to our management team, which allows them to be ultra-competitive, ultra-focused on what our guests and/or end-user customers are requiring, allows us to be more nimble and sets us up for future success,” Michael Israel, CIO of The Kraft Group, said in a statement.
Due to its diverse – and in many cases highly visible – holdings, The Kraft Group is constantly monitoring its data security environment, specifically looking for things like ransomware attacks.
One of the organization’s goals for data protection is to standardize the environment by “putting a common set of products out there” to ensure simplicity in business operations.
“We are constantly focused on how to make the environment as secure as possible. We ask ourselves, ‘How can we change the way we’re engaging from day to day?’ because of all of these external factors,” Israel said.
The company has standardized internal systems across its entire operating enterprise on Dell Technologies solutions, including everything from manufacturing data to stadium-based data. According to Israel, every one of The Kraft Group’s business units and locations currently runs a standard set of backup software and storage systems.
“We have completely standardized our backup environment on Dell across the enterprise,” he said. Israel explained that The Kraft Group currently has over 500 virtual servers in their environment, all being run on VMware, and over 600 terabytes of data being managed in their environment.
The most important component of The Kraft Group’s data protection is enabling its disaster recovery plan, which flows to one common disaster recovery location that would allow the company to restart any of its businesses in case of an emergency.
Before upgrading its technology, The Kraft Group had disparate systems across its operating companies. The holding company wanted to consolidate those systems into one common platform that could allow it to also build a common disaster recovery system and process for remediation.
Since its new investment in advanced technology to alter its data protection environment, The Kraft Group has seen a reduction in time for backups, an overall process enhancement, standardized structure across its entire enterprise, “but more important, a common platform which we can restore from, and which we can manage,” he said.
“We did an analysis of a variety of platforms that were out there for protecting our data, but our partnership with Dell Technologies led us to the Avamar product and it has been just a great asset to the organization,” Israel said.