2020 has been a tough year for everyone. Unless of course, you’re a conspiracy enthusiast, a manufacturer of face masks, or a Ransomware operator. While the scourge of ransomware has been with us for the better part of the past decade, the past year alone has witnessed a deluge of ransomware attacks which have collectively caused billions of dollars in damage and have crippled the operations of organizations across practically every industry.
Ransomware Attacks On The Rise in 2020
According to a study conducted by Check Point Research, the third quarter of 2020 saw a 50% increase in the daily average of ransomware attacks, compared to the first half of the year. Meanwhile, a report published by ZDNet this past September warned of a seven-fold rise in ransomware attacks compared with last year alone and advised that ransomware operators are continually evolving their tactics. While companies are investing heavily in technologies to help prevent ransomware attacks in the first place, IT leaders are recognizing they need to also make their infrastructure more resilient in the event of a major disruptive event.
How to Recover From a Ransomware Attack
One Scale Computing customer has unfortunately experienced the agony of a ransomware attack firsthand. This customer is a publicly traded, multi-billion dollar contract manufacturer of electronics and design services, employing more than 10,000 workers across dozens of advanced manufacturing facilities around the world.
With a large and growing distributed workforce operating across a dozen time zones, their IT leadership team decided it was time to modernize their IT infrastructure by adopting a hyperconverged approach, with an immediate goal of simplifying their IT operations in general while also reducing their CapEx spending. Over the long term, their team was confident a hyperconverged model would better position their organization to establish a more agile and centralized IT operating environment that would enable them to centralize and standardize their IT stack at each of their global manufacturing facilities -- an objective which had proven especially elusive with their existing legacy IT systems.
However, in the midst of their hyperconverged journey, this customer was hit with a fast-spreading and debilitating ransomware attack which encrypted critical data on thousands of machines and disrupted operations across all of their facilities worldwide. In all, it took four days for them to bring their phones and email back online and a full 10 days before they were able to bring the rest of their systems back to life. Not only were their operations hindered but much of the data and applications on their legacy servers were either lost or took months to fully recover.
In response to this attack, our customer’s Director of Infrastructure was tasked with rebuilding their infrastructure as quickly as possible. As part of this effort, they reached out to multiple vendors requesting that additional storage and compute resources be supplied as quickly as possible. While the larger vendors said they could not deliver any hardware in less than 45 days, Scale Computing offered to help in any way possible and was able to meet their needs as they rebuilt their systems immediately following the attack.
Leverage Secure IT Infrastructure with Scale Computing
While Scale Computing had at this point only been deployed at a couple of sites, our customer was able to rely on the HC3 Data Protection Suite to quickly recover their critical data at those sites. As this customer tells it, “we had already deployed three Scale Computing stacks for the Proof of Concept and those were my first sites to be back up. Had we completed our Scale Computing deployment worldwide we would have been back in operation much sooner. Everything we had on Scale Computing Backups and Snapshots was quick and easy to bring back online.”
Ransomware and other advanced persistent attacks will undoubtedly remain a major concern for companies in 2021 and beyond and while it may not be possible to protect your organization from the array of threats both known and unknown, you can invest in technologies like Scale Computing’s HC3 so in the event of a disaster, you can build back faster. Visit our Data Protection Solutions page to learn more about Scale HC3 can deliver simplified and superior resiliency to your IT infrastructure. Or, if you want to talk to someone, please email us at info@scalecomputing.com.