Australian ERM Power in Energy Business Chooses Rubrik

Rubrik, Inc. announced ERM Power Ltd is using Rubrik to help deliver on its energy cost and emissions reduction strategy at a time when Australian businesses continue to be stung by high energy prices.

The customer is an energy retailer that focuses on reducing customers’ energy costs and emissions. It does this by procuring electricity for large commercial and industrial businesses, and also offering consulting and digital services to help customers regain control of their energy consumption.

ERM Power deployed Rubrik as the final piece of a technology refresh focused on modernising its internal workflows to further improve the services it offers to customers to ensure BC and boosts productivity by providing backup and recovery capabilities.

As well as the ability to recover from any point in time to defend vs. ransomware, ERM Power has experienced increased reliability of backups and a reduction in recovery time. As a result, Rubrik simplified the ongoing management of ERM Power’s hybrid cloud environment, and simultaneously made the data available in a secure environment for analytics.

“Over the past 10 years, there’s been a real lack of cohesive energy policy in Australia, which has forced businesses to take matters into their own hands to deal with high energy prices,” said Derek McKay, CIO, ERM Power. “So, we asked ourselves: how can we, as a retailer, help our customers cut their energy bills? This led to a digital overhaul to replace our end-of-life IT with new technology investments. We then introduced Rubrik to automate and simplify the management of all the new data being generated, giving us a secure and reliable data environment.“

Before Rubrik, ERM Power used a tape-based backup solution which was subject to tape media corruption and could be challenging when restoring large systems which were stored across multiple tape sets. In addition to technical complexity, the previous environment was also on-premises, leaving the organization more susceptible in the event of a natural disaster. Future systems would need to be able to assist in mitigating this risk to BC and Rubrik’s replication technology addressed those requirements.

Critical in ERM Power’s selection was Rubrik’s ability to ‘just work’, empowering its IT team of seven to focus on high-value projects rather than being bogged down by babysitting backups.

According to McKay, additional benefits include: 

• 88% management time savings: ERM Power reduced the time it spent managing backup data from 45 minutes to a few minutes per day. As a result, it gained approximately 21 days back to the business in added productivity.
• Accelerated development release cycles with 90%+ faster data restores: Rubrik decreased the time it takes the team to restore a 2TB database from over 24 hours to five minutes.
• Cloud archival to AWS: Provides additional confidence the data is protected and reduces the need for onsite storage capacity.
• 84% reduction in data centre footprint: Rubrik helped decrease data centre footprint from 26U to 4U, providing additional savings on cooling and power costs.
• Immutability to defend vs. ransomware, so the team can quickly restore a clean copy of business-critical data in case of an attack.

“The Australian energy sector is under constant scrutiny as consumers and companies alike become increasingly vocal about energy affordability,” said Luke McGoldrick, country manager Australia and New Zealand, Rubrik. “With Rubrik establishing a reliable operations environment for ERM Power, the organization is able to focus its efforts on continuing to deliver high-quality digital services to its commercial customers with assurance that its systems are secured and up-to-date.

“Simplification is one of our core values, so we wanted data management that we didn’t need to monitor, configure or report on every day. Rubrik automates the management of our data, safeguarding us from downtime, and providing a foundation on which we can deliver new services based on accurate data. Previously, it could take over 24 hours to restore a 2TB database for our developers – we can now achieve this in 5 minutes.“