Case Study: Arnold Clark achieves simplified, ransomware-protected backup and faster restores with Cohesity

Leading Auto Retailer Arnold Clark Selects Cohesity and Cisco For Backup, Restore, and Ransomware Protection

Arnold Clark, Europe’s largest independent multi-franchise automobile retailer with more than 200 UK dealerships, £4.5bn turnover and 11,000 employees, faced growing data-management challenges across its distributed business. An aging, complex backup and DR platform created high operational overhead, slow backup windows, inadequate SQL protection, costly offsite tape archiving, poor capacity efficiency and insufficient ransomware protection—putting revenue and reputation at risk.

Arnold Clark replaced the legacy stack with a Cohesity–Cisco hyperconverged solution (Cohesity Helios/SmartFiles on Cisco UCS/HyperFlex with Intersight), delivering incremental scaling, immutable and encrypted backups, and simplified management. The rollout reduced hundreds of backup jobs to five policies, cut restores from 6–7 hours to about an hour, reclaimed 600TB of backup on 200TB of physical storage (2.7x efficiency), saved staff time and lowered costs while providing robust ransomware protection and predictable, board-approved budgeting.

Arnold Clark

Pat Malloy

Head of Networks and Platform Engineering