Sky Italia achieves GDPR compliance in five months and reduces infrastructure footprint by 90%+

Background

Sky Italia is a leading European media and entertainment company owned by Comcast Corporation. Sky Italia creates award-winning original content, produces major live sporting events, and hosts news and arts programming. The company’s innovative products include smart TVs, an aggregator platform, streaming services, smart home protection and both residential and business broadband. 

Objectives

Achieving GDPR Compliance While Improving Security

Sky Italia was under a tight data privacy compliance deadline. GDPR was set to become operational in May 2018, and Sky Italia had a five-month window to get data within its non-production environments to comply with GDPR. At the same time, Sky Italia needed to improve its data security. In order to keep data safe and secure for all their business critical applications, Sky Italia needed to reorganize their data centers and separate production data and non- production data. 

Improving Test Data Management (TDM) Procedures

At the same time, Sky Italia was operating with inefficient TDM practices. Before adopting Delphix, Sky Italia had been pulling production data into its non-production environments, which exposed the sensitive data. The effort, time, and impact of moving this data from production databases was limiting the company’s ability to refresh development and test environments. 

Sky Italia’s data would be refreshed once per year at best prior to adopting Delphix. But sometimes, teams would be forced to use data that was four years old or more. Each refresh process would also halt application teams’ development and testing for a duration of 1-2 months. In that inefficient state, it would take six months to deliver new business capabilities, which impeded Sky Italia’s ability to offer new services to end-users.

Achievements & Business Impact

As a result of implementing Delphix, Sky Italia achieved the following results:

Ensuring Compliance and Security

• Met GDPR compliance standards in five months, before GDPR became operational
• Completed second project wave seven months later— covering the full perimeter of business critical applications
• Achieved GDPR compliance by masking production data, which provides fully representative yet scrambled data that maintains referential integrity
• Finished non production data relocation and optimization in approximately 3 months, guaranteeing the continuity of development and testing activities.

Increasing Quality & Productivity

• Reduced bugs and outages in application production, improving application quality
• Increased number of development and integrated testing environments
• Improved the speed and quality of software releases
• Enabled multiple parallel go-to-market initiatives
• Accelerated company’s strategic project of providing broadband services
• Enhanced productivity by ensuring more pipelines in parallel with fresh data and enabling parallel test beds to run multiple business initiatives simultaneously
• Condensed infrastructure footprint by over 90%
• Slashed operational costs by 30%