In the ongoing battle against cyber criminals, a high level of data protection from malicious activities is crucial for engineering businesses and their customers. In the last couple of years, the UK has suffered the third-highest number of ransomware attacks globally, and manufacturing/engineering was one of the most likely sectors to be affected.
More than 40 per cent of businesses targeted opted to pay the ransom, but that doesn’t guarantee immunity from attack. The best course of action is always preventative – and that was the challenge set and met by cloud and data specialist PeaSoup for global engineering supplier Guttridge Ltd (a Mitchells Company).
Connecting with the cloud
Guttridge, which provides bulk materials handling solutions for a wide range of industry sectors, was keen to upgrade and future-proof its data protection so selected PeaSoup to implement Veeam Cloud Connect, cloud backup and recovery, for up to 10 of its core servers. The Veeam Cloud Connect service protects against natural and technological disasters, malicious deletion and ransomware.
Guttridge had a high expectation for data protection and therefore the backup and recovery service had to be fully encrypted, include WAN accelerator in case of low bandwidth, and supported by 24/7 monitoring. Additionally, the replica backup needed to be stored in UK tier-3 data centres for data sovereignty.
Double-safe data with cloud backups
After an initial consultation, the PeaSoup tech team deployed Veeam Cloud Connect, quickly helping Guttridge to achieve comprehensive data protection for all workloads. This solution included licensing and no ingress or egress bandwidth charges, thus avoiding the costs of a secondary site or dedicated additional bandwidth.
Backups from the production premises (onsite) are then further backed up to a hosted cloud repository (offsite) through a secure SSL connection. The encrypted separation between the production site and the cloud helps to safeguard against ransomware and other cyber threats.
Veeam Cloud Connect service enables Guttridge to prohibit the deletion of data through immutability with Insider Protection, protecting the data from loss as a result of cyber-attacks, malware activity or any other malicious actions. Insider Protection is a standard free-of-charge feature provided by PeaSoup, ensuring that cloud backups are not deleted accidentally or intentionally for seven days. What’s more, this feature doesn’t affect backup storage size (quotas), keeping the costs down.
Encryption keys are held by Guttridge with an extra seven-day protection policy to stop attacks where all data can be completely deleted, yet still recovered by PeaSoup’s technical support which is available 24/7/365.
Flexibility – fast
Steven Shearer, IT manager at Guttridge, said: “From the initial consultation and understanding of our needs, we have in place the onboarding process, flexibility and fast deployment. PeaSoup provided us with a robust cloud backup which has become part of Guttridge’s continuity planning.”
PeaSoup Head of Marketing, Art Malinowski, added: “We’re delighted that PeaSoup has become a trusted partner for Guttridge with our Backup & Recovery as a Service offering powered by Veeam. Our onboarding actions, preferential charges and technical support helped us to complete implementation quickly and avoid non-conformity. We also increased Guttridge’s storage quotas to now exceed 10TB so they are in a very good place for the foreseeable future.”
Safeguarding assets
Data is the most valuable asset a company has and safeguarding it should be the highest priority. Companies targeted with malware that pay the ransom are usually classified as an “easy target” by cyber criminals. Even if they pay up, there is no guarantee of getting their data back and no guarantee that they won’t be attacked again. Furthermore, compromised company data can result in weighty fines from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
Art Malinowski concluded: “Succumbing to a malicious attack to the extent that systems go offline can seriously tarnish a company’s image. Guttridge protected its reputation as well as its data assets by combining both local and cloud-based backups to significantly reduce the risk of breaches. Other engineering and manufacturing companies would do well to follow their lead.”
