Case Study: Mazda achieves 95% lower data-protection costs and faster disaster recovery with Microsoft Azure

Mazda Gains Better Data Protection, 95 Percent Lower Costs Using Hybrid Cloud Storage

Mazda North American Operations, which supports nearly 700 dealers across the U.S. and Mexico, needed more reliable offsite protection for the critical SaaS applications and laptop data its dealers depend on. Its legacy process—disk-based virtual tape to physical tapes sent offsite—could take up to 24 hours to restore data, left tier-two/tier-three systems and laptops without adequate offsite protection, and required engineers to spend significant time handling tapes.

Mazda deployed Microsoft StorSimple appliances integrated with Azure Storage and Azure Backup to automate cloud snapshots, encryption, deduplication, and compression. The hybrid solution enabled restores in minutes instead of 24 hours, reduced backup storage from roughly 2 PB to about 150 TB, cut data protection costs by 95 percent, and freed up about 20 percent of engineers’ time, while positioning the company to expand its use of Azure services.

Mazda

Kai Sookwongse

Department Manager, Enterprise Infrastructure Services