Nonprofit
Ransomware recovery strategy for a large Chicago nonprofit
A large Chicagoland nonprofit had been hit by ransomware several times, and its backups could not handle granular attacks on file and financial data. Storcom put in a new storage platform with 15-minute snapshots, backed by incremental-forever backups every four hours and archive to a DR site. The system has been tested and used for real recoveries.
Published . Client details withheld at the client’s request.
The challenge
The organization had been targeted by ransomware on multiple occasions, suffering downtime and putting its data at serious risk.
Its backup solution could not cope with the granular nature of the attacks, which hit file data and endangered critical financial data.
What Storcom did
We implemented a multi-tiered data protection design with very low recovery point and recovery time objectives, built on a new storage platform with snapshot technology in the storage layer.
First line of defense: scheduled snapshots every fifteen minutes for short-term retention. If an attack lands at 11:20 a.m., the team recovers from the 11:15 a.m. snapshot to limit data loss. Restoring an entire VM takes seconds to hours.
Second line of defense: point-in-time backups that run incremental-forever every four hours for the first week.
Data archives to a disaster recovery site for long-term retention for compliance and auditing.
The design follows Storcom’s Ransomware Prevention and Recovery Roadmap and runs on Recover by Storcom.
The outcome
- The organization has tested the system many times and has used it to recover data in real-world data-loss scenarios.
- There has been no full-fledged attack recently, and leadership knows the organization can recover rapidly and reliably if one comes.
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