The Case
RENAISSANCE’s goal is to enrich their customers’ lives with a sense of purpose achieved through sports and health. When it was time for Renaissance to refresh their storage infrastructure, they knew managing data would be a critical component to avoid excessive growth which would result in increasing
cost and risk exposure.
Renaissance wanted to start by creating hard limits on the amount of data that could be stored, so they contacted Northern to get assistance in setting up a granular, and informationrich, disk quota management structure.
“We set up multi-layer quotas on shares and folders for about 1,300 employees across clubs and each department at HQ. In opposite to our previous solution, Northern’s solution is much more automated and does not only allow us to set limits
on the amount, but also provide information about what data is being stored.”
To get users to manage their data promptly and thereby reduce burden on the help-desk, automatic e-mail notifications are sent when the users hit predefined usage thresholds.
“The e-mail notifications we have set up contains a link to Northern’s self-service portal. There they can see various toplists of their data like oldest and largest files and delete unnecessary data directly from those lists. Since we let each club and department manage their own space it’s a great advantage to be able to provide this kind of tool for insight into the data. Northern’s self-service portal is quite easy to use
because of its role-based, customizable interface which is important for our less tech-savvy employees.”
Establishing acceptable running state
Before actually imposing hard limits on the amount of data allowed, Renaissance wanted to eliminate data that was no longer needed. By using the information about the data that Northern could provide, users had one month to review and clean up their data before limits were set. This project was very successful, and the total amount of data stored was reduced by 18%. It was also a great opportunity to educate the endusers about the importance of managing their own data.
Reducing risk by analyzing file content
After setting quantity limits on the data and providing high level insight into what data was stored Renaissance wanted to highlight file data containing personal and sensitive information, for example membership lists. Northern’s solution allows them to find files that include My Numbers (Japanese Social Security Numbers), credit card information, phone number etc. The suspect files are then highlighted in the self-service portal as potential risks and can be handled more carefully in the future.
“It’s hard for all employees to know where sensitive information should be saved so files with that kind of information are accidentally saved in the file shares. Northern’s solution uses text mining to find out which files contain personal information and list those files in the self-service portal. That was it’s possible to prevent security leaks in advance.”
Within Renaissance both the fitness clubs and the head office need to handle personal information and the next step is to create policies around where sensitive information are allowed to be stored. The company will use these policies to improve governance and compliance as well as to reduce risk exposure.
Assistance and expertise through the process
Renaissance have been very satisfied with the level of support Northern can offer.
“At the deployment, we had an engineer from Northern onsite. In addition, for issues that came up in daily operations we’ve received fast and responsive remote assistance. Throughout the whole process, from implementation to regular support and maintenance, Northern has been very helpful.”
About the Company
