Modernizing Data Protection & Compliance: Rubrik Powered Cyber Resilience for an Alberta-Based Financial Services Company
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The Challenge
An Alberta-based financial services company, serving clients across Canada with wealth management, registered plans, and trust administration, was outgrowing its legacy data protection strategy.
Over several years of growth, the organization’s data footprint had expanded significantly with more client accounts, more digital documents, and higher transaction volumes. Their existing backup and archive environment, built on a mix of aging systems, was beginning to show its limits:
- Unpredictable backup windows: Nightly backups increasingly pushed into business hours, impacting performance on critical financial systems.
- Complex compliance demands: As regulations evolved, so did expectations around data retention, privacy, and auditability. The legacy model made it difficult to quickly retrieve the right records during audits or legal discovery.
- Rising risk to business continuity: The combination of legacy hardware, media failures, and slow recovery processes created unacceptable risk for a financial services provider whose reputation depends on reliability and trust.
The company’s IT and leadership teams needed a way to modernize backup and archive without disrupting day-to-day operations and they wanted a partner who understood both the technology and the regulatory environment they operated in.
Clutch Solutions Canada, led by Account Executive Mark Weatherbee, was brought in to assess the environment and design a forward-looking data protection strategy.
The Solution
Following a detailed discovery and design phase, Clutch Solutions Canada recommended a unified Rubrik-based architecture to modernize backup, archive, and compliance across the environment. The core components included:
Rubrik Universal Cloud
Rubrik Universal Cloud was deployed to transition the organization away from tape-dependent backups and into a cloud-ready, immutable data protection model. This provided:
- Cloud-based backup storage for key workloads
- Rapid, policy-driven recovery
- Immutable backup copies to strengthen ransomware resilience
- Reduced dependence on physical media and offsite tape vaulting
Rubrik Foundation
Rubrik Foundation became the backbone of the company’s on-premises backup and recovery strategy. It provided:
- Consistent, efficient snapshots of critical application servers, databases, and virtual machines
- Significantly shortened backup windows, with operations now completing well within maintenance windows
- Simplified management via a single, policy-driven interface
Rubrik NAS Direct Archive
To address long-term regulatory retention, Rubrik NAS Direct Archive was implemented to offload infrequently accessed but compliance-sensitive data such as client statements, reports, and historical records from primary storage to an optimized archive tier. This enabled:
- Direct archiving of NAS data to cost-effective cloud storage
- Fast, granular search and retrieval for audits and investigations
- Reduced primary storage consumption without sacrificing accessibility
Implementation with Clutch Solutions Canada
Clutch Solutions Canada coordinated a phased rollout to avoid disruption:
- Environment assessment & design workshops to align technology with compliance and business requirements
- Rubrik deployment and integration with existing storage, virtualization, and core financial systems
- Gradual migration of backup and archive jobs from legacy platforms
- Testing, validation, and documentation, followed by knowledge transfer for the internal IT team
The Results
With the Rubrik solution in place, the Alberta-based financial services company realized immediate and measurable benefits:
- Backup windows reduced
Nightly backups that previously risked overrunning into production hours now complete reliably within designated windows, with less performance impact on critical financial systems. - Recovery times cut from days to minutes
Restores that once depended on locating and loading tapes — especially for older data — can now be completed in minutes, improving business continuity and internal responsiveness. - Stronger audit and compliance posture
With Rubrik NAS Direct Archive and Universal Cloud, the organization can quickly locate, retrieve, and prove retention of required records, reducing the effort and stress around audits and regulatory reviews. - Predictable, scalable cost model
Moving to a cloud-enabled architecture reduced reliance on physical media, vaulting, and unplanned hardware refresh, replacing them with a more predictable OPEX-based model. - Less operational overhead for IT
Eliminating manual tape handling and simplifying backup administration freed IT staff to focus on higher-value initiatives, including digital transformation and new client-facing services. - Future-ready data protection
The organization now has a scalable, policy-based platform that can accommodate future growth, new applications, and evolving compliance requirements — without a full re-architecture.
By partnering with Clutch Solutions Canada and leveraging Rubrik, this Alberta-based financial services company transformed its backup and archival strategy into a modern, resilient, and compliant data protection platform, ready to support the next phase of its growth
