Meredith Adopts Rubrik and AWS

Meredith Corporation has deployed Rubrik, Inc. as their standardized data protection solution.

Meredith Adopts Rubrik And Aws

With Rubrik, Meredith has adopted AWS for long-term data retention, further ensuring continuous availability of media assets and eliminating the need for tape. Rubrik Polaris GPS has helped Meredith to avoid costly downtime, assist with meeting compliance regulations, and ultimately protect the company’s bottom line.

Meredith is one of America’s largest media companies and home of brands including People, Better Homes & Gardens, InStyle and Allrecipes. Founded in 1902 in Des Moines, IA, with 6,000 employees, it has a monthly reach of more than 180 million unduplicated Americans each month, including nearly 135 million monthly unique website visitors, and a broadcast television reach of 11% of US households.

Prior to Rubrik, it had a mix of data management solutions – as a result of multiple acquisitions to protect its critical environment. After the acquisition of Time Inc. in January 2018, the IT team needed to address this situation. With dozens of disparate legacy systems, the company found it was labor-intensive to monitor and maintain, and faced a constant upgrade cycle.

“In the media industry, downtime could mean a magazine edition doesn’t go to print on time or a TV segment doesn’t run,” said David Coffman, director of enterprise infrastructure, Meredith. “From a business perspective, we see the benefits of adopting cloud as endless. Eliminating tape, embracing Rubrik, and migrating to the cloud was a bold decision, but also the right one for Meredith.“

Rubrik’s native support for AWS has enabled Meredith to protect its workloads on Amazon S3, allowing for quicker restores and DR. This has allowed the company to migrate off of tape, eliminating overhead costs and recovery uncertainty. As part of its digital transformation efforts, the IT team had begun to migrate certain workloads to Amazon EC2 but relied on native AWS snapshot tools. With Rubrik, Meredith can incorporate Amazon EC2 backups into the same data protection solution as its on-premises backups.

“When we found out Rubrik can incorporate Amazon EC2 backups into the same data protection solution as our on-premises backups, the purchase decision was a no brainer,” said Coffman. “With the new ability to protect an Amazon EC2 instance by tag, server administrators will be able to opt-in to backups simply by putting a certain tag on the Amazon EC2 instance. This vastly simplifies protecting Amazon EC2 instances and we see huge growth potential in this aspect of the business.“

Meredith is using Rubrik to protect Meredith’s 90% virtualized environment, including SQL and Oracle, and cloud.

Additional results for Meredith include:

90%+ management time savings over legacy solution: It had two full-time employees just managing backups. Now they only spend a few hours per day checking Rubrik, allowing the team to spend more time on strategic, value-add work that increases internal collaboration and enhances the customer experience.
90%+ faster restores: Previously, recovering data could sometimes take days depending on if that data was on tape. It was a laborious process that impacted productivity.
Upgrades: It no longer needs to coordinate upgrades on multiple backup servers and hundreds of clients; the Rubrik support team handles it all. This painless upgrade process has saved the team more than 25 days per year to focus on strategic projects.
Visibility and control with Polaris GPS: Polaris GPS is a unified system of record, giving a simple, bird’s-eye view of all of its four sites, allowing to centrally manage infrastructure.
Streamlined compliance: As a publicly-traded company, the company is subject to stringent compliance requirements like PCI and SOX. With its previous solution, there were a number of incidents which required additional work to provide proof of compliance. Rubrik automatically delivers end-to-end encryption for data both in-flight and at-rest, which helps provide auditors with evidence of compliance for backup requirements.

“We are proud that one of America’s largest media companies trusts Rubrik to protect its IP,” said Arvind Nithrakashyap, co-founder and CTO, Rubrik. “At Rubrik, we make it simple for large enterprises like Meredith to move away from outdated legacy solutions, gain control of fragmented data and achieve its digital transformation goals.“

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