Rubrik, the Cloud Data Management company, today announced it has been selected by the Scottish Government's Agriculture and Rural Economy (ARE) Directorate to protect and manage its mission critical data. Rubrik is delivering a scalable and centralized data management solution for backup, disaster recovery and archival, allowing ARE to easily and reliably demonstrate security compliance. 

The ARE Directorate, headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland, plays a key role in Scotland's rural economy. As well as interpreting EU regulations and assessing the validity of over 20,000 farmers' subsidy claims every year, it is also responsible for paying £750m in subsidies annually.

With 1,200 employees across 18 offices, ARE continually develops and maintains applications that support the growing number of farmers applying for subsidies. Associated responsibilities include managing identifiable data and meeting the government's strict security and payment standards.

Previously, the organization relied on fragmented multipoint backup and recovery products that were difficult to manage and didn't guarantee end-to-end encryption. Using Rubrik's highly secure and reliable data management solution, ARE is able to simplify its auditing process and achieve end-to-end security compliance. After deploying Rubrik to protect its VMware, Windows and Linux workloads for its physical and virtual environments, ARE was able to:

• Centralize its data management, creating 60% management time savings as well as 33% total cost in ownership (TCO) savings. 
• Benefit from a 6x faster backup performance versus the legacy backup solution. 
• Reduce its data by 79% by maximizing the organization's storage efficiency. 
• Minimize downtime and reduce restore time. With its legacy solution, average recovery time was 40 minutes. With Rubrik, it takes less than one minute. 
• Seamlessly integrate with AWS S3, in accordance with the Scottish Government's cloud-first approach. As Rubrik is vendor agnostic, ARE now has the flexibility to scale to any cloud and avoid vendor lock-in. 
• Easily change and apply new policies across its environment, using Rubrik's flexible policy-based management, to quickly meet new industry regulations.

"Rubrik smashed our security requirements right out of the box, more than exceeding our expectations. With its comprehensive approach to security, Rubrik ensures our data is kept safe and we remain compliant," said Neill Smith, Head of IT Infrastructure at ARE. "What's more, everything about Rubrik has been extremely straightforward. It has simplified our auditing process and we can now implement new requirements in the blink of an eye. In an industry with constantly evolving rules and regulations, this is paramount for us to meet compliance standards and avoid large fines."

"We're proud to be protecting the Scottish Government's sensitive data as well as helping it on its way to a cloud-first approach," said Martin Brown, Director of Western Europe at Rubrik. "With Rubrik, this government organization now has peace of mind that its mission-critical data is being handled securely, allowing it to easily demonstrate security compliance in a highly regulated sector, and avoid the large fines for noncompliance."