Data Protection Use Cases

Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industry (AEC)

The AEC industry is using vast amounts of data which is normally part of a building project’s development. Many within the AEC industries use Building Information Modeling (BIM) to help plan, design, construct, and manage buildings and infrastructure from concept through completion. These companies and organizations accumulate data related to their suppliers, workers, clients and every other party that they collaborate with. Typically, everyone involved has access to the integrated database, improving collaboration, productivity, and insight, while also being extremely resource-intensive, which requires a highly available infrastructure.

A construction company’s operations rely heavily on IT, and any downtime could mean a break in manufacturing or prevent designers from working on new plans and models. As its IT Manager explains, “If we have an IT outage, as well as having users sitting around waiting for us to get things back up and running, there’s also a risk of files being corrupted. The impact of not being able to work and having to remake designs would be very costly.” The company’s existing data backup solution was aging and slow, with backups taking more than three days to complete and increasing the risk of data loss. To reduce risk, free up IT resources and ensure business continuity, they needed a high performing solution for backup and disaster recovery.

Arranged a demonstration of the solution and subsequently helped with implementing it, which went live in August 2017. Ten servers, including SQL, Exchange and file servers, are backed up every night, protecting design files, 3D models, emails, databases and other critical files and data. Eight terabytes of data is then replicated to the Cloud to enable disaster recovery. “As we’re based on one site, replicating our backups to cloud ensures business continuity in the event of a major incident or a hardware defect,” added IT Manager. The backup window has reduced from three days to less than one hour, and data can be restored in under 30 minutes, safeguarding valuable work and minimizing disruption to users.

With on-prem device and Cloud, they can be sure that data is protected, and that files, systems, and operations can be restored quickly and easily, minimizing disruption to the business and its customers. “This gives us confidence that data backups are taken care of; it’s much less prone to errors than our previous solution, and performs better,” explained by the IT Manager.

The reliability and ease of use of the solution is also freeing up the IT team. “It rarely encounters problems and takes very little time to manage, which means we can focus on better supporting our users and developing new software,” The solution has also enabled to: Ensure business continuity, reduce risks and protect its reputation as a market leader. As the company continues to expand its technical capabilities and grow its business, time is a valuable resource. “The fact that it gives me more time to focus on innovation is a wonderful thing. It means the IT department can focus on supporting the business, safe in the knowledge that if anything goes wrong it won’t have a major impact,” he concluded.

HMO/Hospitals

This award-winning healthcare system offers nearly 500 beds and admits almost 17,000 patients each year. Throughout its more than 60 years of operation, it has pursued excellence through innovation. Now 3,000 employees-strong, the healthcare system is dedicated to providing quality health services in a Christian environment.

Continuously incorporating the latest in medical technology means the healthcare system’s data protection needs are constantly growing, too.

The system’s IT Network Administrator said the frequency and severity of attacks impressed the importance of maintaining topnotch data protection upon the hospital’s administration. “The last ransomware attack was unbelievably major,” the IT Network Administrator says. “The last one hit 45 different servers, spread itself, and just went crazy.”

The attack was so severe, in fact, that it attracted attention from top company leaders. “The executive suite actually moved into my office for a period of time, if that tells you anything,” he says. “I’ve got the CIO in one chair. And, I’ve got the CFO in another chair—on the phone with the CEO. This was Ground Zero, because I do the backups.”

The healthcare system’s nightly backup routine, executed by the backup and recovery appliance, was its only defense against the ransomware attacker. The IT Network Administrator said it empowered him to restore the backup from the previous night, losing only a few hours’ worth of data.

Ransomware attacks have been just one of the data disasters this healthcare system has faced. Physical servers have also failed, erasing all of the data they held. But the IT Network Administrator said his past recovery experiences with the solution have been simple and straightforward. “We’ve had to recover entire servers,” he says. “We’ve had to recover data on servers that didn’t exist anymore. Recovery took no more than 24 hours, in most cases.”

The healthcare system is currently protecting 38TBs of usable data in a hybrid environment that includes 200 on-site physical servers and 130 virtual servers. Before upgrading, though, the healthcare system was running up against the capacity limits of its existing backup and recovery appliance; it was time to upgrade. “Planning for data growth was our primary challenge,” he notes. “And our second challenge was that our current hardware was about five years old. I get nervous around the third year.”

Stockbrokerage

The backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solution has been a game changer according to David Deuerling, Chief Technology Officer. For starters, it provides greater flexibility and control over customer data. “Its simplicity and ease of use are incredible. It can manage all the clients under a single pane of glass and easily monitor backups. We can tell if there are any errors, and log in remotely to fix any errors if necessary,”.

It paid off especially well when an accounting firm had a nasty run-in with ransomware. Early one morning, the customer called because they couldn’t access any of their files. They quickly diagnosed the issue and found the root of the issue: a phishing email clicked on by two employees at the firm had let ransomware into their systems, instantly locking over 300,000 critical business files. Working with the support to restore the firm’s data from the most recent backup, all in all, the restoration process was a piece of cake, according to their CTO. “We mounted the shares and restored all the files. It was an incredibly easy process. If we had been relying on the previous BDR solution we were leveraging before this, we might still be recovering data today,” he said. After it was all said and done, the accounting firm was back in action. Losing business-critical files can be terrible for any business, especially for a firm that handles sensitive client data and deals with strict government deadlines on a regular basis. The solution allows businesses to avoid major long-term damage from data loss, corruption or hijacking. For them, the solution is superior in multiple ways. The ease of use, automation and backup frequency is incredible.