Mall of America Increases Productivity and Drives Continued Innovation with Rubrik

Overview

Mall of America (MOA), located in Bloomington, Minnesota, is the largest mall in the United States. In addition to over 520 stores, Mall of America is home to Nickelodeon Universe, a 7-acre indoor amusement park. MOA also houses the 1,300,000-gallon Sea Life Minnesota Aquarium. Since opening its doors in 1992, MOA welcomes an average of 40 million people from around the world per year and generates nearly $2 billion in economic impact each year.

Janette Smrcka, IT Director, manages MOA’s 20-person IT team and believes in cultivating memorable moments for guests through streamlined IT operations. “Our team is made of problem-solvers,” said Smrcka. “It’s unique in that many of them came from other departments within Mall of America. They know exactly how the business operates on a wider scale, what IT means to the business, and how IT can either enable or inhibit a guest’s experience. Whether it’s empowering our employees or creating technology that guests interact with directly, IT is paramount in elevating customer satisfaction.”

"Our number one priority as a business is to make sure that our guests have an amazing experience on our property, and we help create those moments through digital transformation initiatives driven by our IT team. To us, that means constantly reevaluating our processes for opportunities to increase efficiencies. We’ve never been a company that sits still; having partners like Rubrik that think outside the box helps us move even faster."

Solutions

Superior guest experience with significant time savings

 With Rubrik’s simple, automated data management, MOA is spending considerably less time monitoring backups. From proactively preventing against data loss by implementing encrypted email capabilities to enhancing their mobile work environment so that employees can remotely access their applications, the team is now able to focus on optimizing IT processes to deliver more value back to the business, in addition to enhancing the safety of MOA’s environment.

“Every morning, our maintenance staff and operational staff do a safety check for the Nickelodeon Universe amusement rides, a process done via paper for the past 20 years,” said Smrcka. “Our increase in productivity post-Rubrik allowed our team to develop and launch a new internal application that will help perform that manual check electronically, allowing us to not only report on that data, but also get our staff back on the floor with guests faster. With Rubrik, our team is able to be curious and suggest even more ways to benefit our property through transformative technologies; that sort of innovation isn’t possible when your team is busy just keeping the lights on.”

Rapid restores for streamlined upgrades

Availability is paramount for MOA, whose legacy backup solution threatened their “always on” mindset with slow restores and clunky system upgrades.

“We had little confidence in our previous solution that we would be able to perform timely restores, a critical part of maintaining our availability requirements,” said DJ Mulugeta, IT Manager. “Previously, I would have to spend 8 hours restoring our SQL servers in preparation for critical upgrades. If that information was on tape, we would sometimes have to spend several days just finding and indexing the right information. It was a painfully long process that severely impaired our productivity.”