Overview

A consistent leader in the Gartner® MQ for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions, the client is a global leader in data protection software.

Challenge

The client partnered with Ness to engineer their flagship backup product—their largest revenue earner, used by more than 87,000 customers and 87% of the Fortune 500 companies—to carry out their data protection and backup tasks. The product is pervasive across the enterprise and is relied on for backup and recovery of on-prem software and hybrid and multi-cloud environments.​

The client wanted to transform the way security was applied to the product. In the current design, all backup services were required to run under superuser privileges (root) to undertake operations across master servers, media servers, and attached clients. Since the client backs up some of the world’s most critical data, there was a need to re-architect the backup to perform as a non-privileged account (non-root) to ensure limited exposure in the case of a system compromise.

Solution

Ness built a feature delivery schedule to balance complexity versus business needs. The Ness team worked with the client to understand their specific nuances, followed by a design phase to create a POC for complex services. ​

The project converted Primary Server Daemons, followed by Media Servers and Client Daemons. With change propagation to the Command Line Interfaces and UI used by the product, the solution supported various form factors and back-level media/clients running services under the root. Ness used its storage domain to fast-track the development of automation test cases across Windows and Unix environments.