Where Petabytes Meet Peace of Mind

The Win

What if you could guarantee a clean recovery for your most critical data, no matter the threat? For organizations in highly regulated industries, this isn't just a goal—it's a necessity. The last line of defense for data must be absolute, a challenge that IT services provider Pink Elephant decided to meet head-on by building one of Europe’s most resilient data protection platforms.

Pink Elephant delivers ultra-resilient, compliant backup infrastructure for sectors where data integrity is non-negotiable. From ransomware protection and long-term archiving to disaster recovery, the company helps customers meet the toughest data protection requirements. This commitment required a foundational shift away from a complex, multi-vendor environment toward a unified, powerful, and scalable solution.

A Mission to Make IT Personal

Based in the Netherlands, Pink Elephant is an IT services provider with a clear mission: “make IT personal.” Its primary focus is on delivering high-performance, compliant backup and data management services tailored to the needs of regulated sectors like healthcare, public services, and enterprise IT. With deep expertise in disaster recovery, long-term storage, and automation, the team helps customers ensure data resilience and regulatory compliance at scale.

The company also offers sovereign cloud capabilities through its Pink Cloud platform. This is one part of a broader portfolio that includes modern workplace transformation and AI enablement, all supported by a secure infrastructure hosted in Tier 3 or above data centers across the Netherlands and Germany.

Resilience Under Rising Pressure

As Pink Elephant expanded its services, the demands on its infrastructure intensified. Customers faced increasingly sophisticated cyber threats and required fast, clean recovery options with full data isolation. At the same time, new regulatory frameworks raised the bar for compliance, demanding detailed audit trails, documented recovery processes, and uninterrupted data availability.

Adding to the complexity, customers expected near-perfect uptime. Any disruption, no matter how minor, could compromise trust. The existing multivendor infrastructure was fragmented and inefficient, creating an unacceptable level of risk.

To meet these pressures, Pink Elephant needed a new foundation, one that could unify its infrastructure, simplify operations, and scale confidently while ensuring airtight data protection and compliance.

A Unified NetApp Foundation

Pink Elephant chose NetApp® as its strategic storage backbone, engineering a powerful, integrated solution. The team relies on NetApp ONTAP® for snapshots and replication, StorageGRID® for long-term geo-redundant object storage, and Keystone® STaaS for flexible, consumption-based scaling. High-performance NetApp AFF and FAS systems provide the speed and capacity needed for primary and backup storage.

These technologies combine to support a highly automated, audit-ready environment. This facilitates clean recoveries, simplifies regulatory compliance, and allows Pink Elephant to scale without compromise.

Security and Compliance, Delivered at Scale

With NetApp, Pink Cloud is now one of the most resilient data protection platforms in Europe. The environment manages over 250 petabytes of data and continues to grow. Since deploying the new infrastructure, Pink Elephant has experienced zero unplanned storage outages, a testament to the solution's reliability.

The operational impact has been just as significant. The team can now provision full tenant environments in under 15 minutes, and automated operations have cut manual storage tasks in half. This efficiency allows Pink Elephant to manage more than 800 virtual machines for backup orchestration and protect between 500,000 to over one million Office 365 mailboxes.

This capability translates into real-world outcomes for clients. Healthcare and public-sector organizations rely on Pink Cloud for secure disaster recovery and long-term retention. In one instance, a healthcare customer passed a critical external audit with zero remarks, thanks entirely to the DR environment built on NetApp ONTAP and StorageGRID.

The Future of Sovereign Resilience

Pink Elephant’s roadmap with NetApp reflects its drive to stay ahead of customer needs and evolving threats. The team is rolling out a premium ransomware SLA designed to deliver recovery and anomaly detection, backed by multi-admin verification for enhanced protection. They are also preparing their infrastructure to support AI and machine learning workloads, ensuring that it's secure, scalable, and future-ready.

Customer control is another key focus, with new policy-based automation features that will allow clients to tailor backup retention, frequency, and recovery goals through an intuitive self-service model. At the same time, Pink Elephant is expanding its StorageGRID footprint and adopting higher-density disk systems to improve investment efficiency and reduce its environmental impact.