Rubrik is honored to have received the Best Data Security and Data Protection award at VMworld 2019, marking our eighth VMworld award in just four years. This win was in partnership with our customer LKAB, a leading Swedish mining company, and recognizes the automation, increased efficiency, and significant business value they achieved with Rubrik Edge. Winners of the award were selected “based on the business benefits, levels of innovation and best practice their projects demonstrated.”

Enabling our customers to tackle the toughest enterprise data management challenges and unlock new value from their data is what drives us. That’s why, in celebration of our Best of VMworld award, I want to share LKAB’s story and the business benefits they’ve realized by deploying Rubrik. 

Modern Data Management for Modern Operations
LKAB is a state-owned mining company that produced 26.9 Mt of iron ore products in 2018 with ambitious plans to increase production by 5% per year through 2021. Due to the modern technology and high cost of running their mines, IT is a crucial component of their operations and supports business-critical applications, as well as their entire global employee base. 

As Robert Pohjanen, IT Architect at LKAB, explains, “Our small IT department supports 4,000 employees in Sweden and 2,000 employees internationally. We are always looking at the total cost of operating our technology solutions and strive to automate processes wherever possible by employing cutting-edge, best-in-class technologies like Rubrik.”

Millions Saved in Downtime Avoidance
LKAB leverages Rubrik to protect multiple applications that are vital to the financial well-being of the company. One of these is an in-house program that tracks all aspects of the mining production line, plans drilling activities, and analyzes data produced in the mine. “If this application failed and could not be restored, we would be forced to shut down the production line within 24-48 hours. It is extremely costly to restart the line, so a failure to restore this app is unacceptable,” says Pohjanen.

Another extremely critical tool is LKAB’s people tracking system, which ensures the mines are clear of people before any dangerous nightly blasting activity commences. Failure of this system means shutting down blasting operations for the night at a cost of 10 000 000 SEK (1,000,000 USD). 

Rubrik helps LKAB ensure business continuity and minimizes the risk of revenue loss from downtime. “We are confident that Rubrik is protecting our critical databases, including the Oracle and SQL Server systems, which drive these essential applications and can quickly recover if needed,” says Pohjanen.

Unified Data Management for ROBO Environments
With three Swedish facilities, and subsidiary offices across the globe, LKAB also needed an innovative solution to protect its remote office environments. They chose to deploy Rubrik Edge, a software-only appliance built for extending simple data protection and management to virtualized and physical remote and branch office (ROBO) environments.

With Rubrik Edge, Pohjanen and his team leverage existing hardware to manage all environments through a central location, while also streamlining their restore process. “Previously, we had to locate the backup before starting a restore. Now, we can quickly recover any user’s data with Rubrik’s Google-like search.”

Increased Operational Efficiency

Rubrik empowered LKAB to increase operational efficiency and enhanced agility with the cloud by moving to Microsoft Azure–something they couldn’t do with their previous legacy solution. Here are some of the results LKAB experienced with Rubrik:

  • 234 days per year and over 700 000 SEK of additional productivity back to the business
  • 90%+ management time savings
  • 90%+ faster restores
  • 90% faster ticket resolution times

We’re honored and humbled that our journey with LKAB has been recognized by VMworld, and we look forward to helping even more customers get the most from their data. Visit our customer page to learn more about Rubrik’s use cases and business benefits.