After a sophisticated form of ransomware shut down the company’s entire network, it turned to iland Secure DRaaS to adapt and recover

iland, a leading VMware-based provider for application hosting, data protection and disaster recovery services delivered on the iland Secure Cloud Platform, today announced that Oceanscan is using iland Secure DRaaS to keep its business up and running in the wake of a recent ransomware attack.

Oceanscan is a leading international equipment company providing the latest and most advanced technology to the oil and gas, defence, petrochemical, renewables, and nuclear industries. Headquartered in Aberdeen, Scotland, and supported by a worldwide network of partner companies, the company is committed to around-the-clock support of its customers.

In late September 2021, a sophisticated strain of ransomware infected Oceanscan’s entire network, encrypting multiple file layers and putting the company at risk of potentially devastating downtime. Oceanscan, an iland customer for nearly a decade, had prepared for this moment and had both iland Secure Cloud DRaaS for Veeam and iland Secure Cloud Backup for Veeam Cloud Connect in place at the time of the attack.

“I cannot stress this enough: We are where we are thanks to the technology and, perhaps most importantly, the people over at iland,” said Sukumar Panchanathan, group IT manager at Oceanscan. “There’s a lot that has to happen in the wake of an attack like this. It’s a tough time. But the iland support team immediately answered our call and we were in a position to recover with just the click of a button. The iland services have been absolutely wonderful. From the bottom of my heart, I cannot thank the iland support staff enough.”

With the company’s on-premises environment compromised, but its workloads already successfully replicated to the cloud thanks to iland Secure Cloud DRaaS, the Oceanscan team decided to move away from its on-premises production environment entirely following the attack and leverage their cloud-based infrastructure with iland. In the weeks following, Oceanscan was able to seamlessly move from iland DRaaS to iland IaaS within a couple of hours and has been running effectively ever since.

“As the rates of cybercrime continue to rise, companies must prepare for the inevitable ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ when it comes to having the tools, people, and process in place to stay protected,” said Brian Ussher, president and co-founder of iland. “Oceanscan chose iland to provide the security, replication, and failover capabilities needed to ensure the company’s data stayed online and available. Designed exactly for moments like this, iland’s industry-leading disaster recovery technology allowed Oceanscan to failover all its applications, seamlessly and without detrimental delays.”

iland provides the highest levels of security capabilities and features available today, integrated with all services, and ready to adapt to today’s ever-increasing security requirements. From Secure Public or Private Cloud (IaaS) to Secure Cloud Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and Secure Cloud Backup as a Service (BaaS), which can include Insider Protection to further protect organisations from internal and external security threats. iland is able to offer the solutions and support needed to protect your data at any time.

Learn more about iland Secure Cloud and iland Secure Cloud DRaaS for Veeam.

New Offering Can Help Businesses Quickly Recover from Ransomware Attacks, Speed Data Recovery, and Advance Business Continuity

 Just months after announcing the availability of its backup as a service offering (BaaS), Cohesity, a leader in next-gen data management, today announced the general availability of its next ‘as a service’ offering – disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). This new offering extends the exceptional disaster recovery (DR) capabilities provided by Cohesity SiteContinuity and adds the ability to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a recovery location for failover and failback in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. This not only provides customers with more choice and flexibility, but also offers the following benefits:

• Minimize downtime and data loss: This greatly reduces the risks of potential downtime and data loss with snapshot-based backup and near-sync replication that together help ensure all data is captured and ready to failover in the event of disaster or cyberattack.
• Meet service level agreements (SLAs): Customers can easily design recovery plans and assign SLAs – and design it in minutes rather than weeks – to deliver the right level of resiliency across a broad range of applications while meeting business requirements.
• Simplify operations: Cohesity uniquely combines disaster recovery orchestration, snapshot-based backup, near-sync replication, and seamless failover to the public cloud in a single comprehensive offering – all managed through a single user interface to significantly simplify disaster recovery operations.
• Lower costs and improve time-to-value: Reduce idle infrastructure by using on-demand pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure from AWS in the event of a disaster or test drill. Cohesity uniquely supports standard AWS infrastructure, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), in a DRaaS model. Customers also can speed up time to value by quickly spinning up a disaster recovery strategy without having to procure additional hardware or physical data centres.

“There has never been a more critical time to offer disaster recovery as a service,” said Matt Waxman, vice president of product management, Cohesity. “In an age of crippling ransomware attacks, the number one concern many IT leaders have is maintaining business continuity if they get hit. DRaaS can help organizations recover quickly and cost effectively. And, as with other Cohesity SaaS and on-premises offerings, customers can manage everything through the Cohesity Helios multicloud platform. It’s simplicity redefined.”

“The Cohesity DRaaS offering provides multiple benefits that are incredibly appealing to our organization,” said Francois Lepage, cybersecurity and architecture manager, The Master Group. “Application uptime and the ability to recover in the cloud top the list. But we also like the pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure model from AWS, which can help reduce costs. And we like the simplicity of it all. We can manage this offering along with our on-premises Cohesity deployment through one platform on one UI. That’s the Cohesity difference.”

Expanding Data Management as a Service

Cohesity DRaaS is the next offering from Cohesity’s comprehensive Data Management as a Service (DMaaS) portfolio. DMaaS is a portfolio of ‘as a service’ offerings designed to provide organizations with a radically simple way to back up, secure, govern, and analyse their data – all managed directly by Cohesity. This reduces the separate services, solutions, and administrative consoles that organizations have traditionally had to invest in and maintain for data backup, disaster recovery, and other data management use cases.

“Solutions that offer flexibility, resiliency, and scalability are integral to organizations working to address ever-evolving challenges, including cyberattacks,” said Doug Yeum, head of AWS Partner Organization, AWS. “With the introduction of disaster recovery as a service, Cohesity is providing these critical capabilities to customers to help reduce the risk of downtime while also reducing costs, all supported with the industry-leading cloud services from AWS.”

“With the increased frequency and cost of cyberattacks, a robust set of disaster recovery processes combined with proven technology have never been more essential,” said Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst, ESG. “Organizations should look for ease of use, automation, and the ability to truly control their data recovery and application availability service-level agreements. That is why Cohesity’s web-scale converged backup and disaster recovery solution is not only timely, but also offers an essential set of capabilities to take on the disaster recovery challenges businesses are facing today.”

For more information:

• Read this blog to learn more about Cohesity SiteContinuity.
• Learn about upcoming SaaS solutions from Cohesity designed to address increasingly sophisticated ransomware attacks Read about upcoming.

About Cohesity

Cohesity radically simplifies data management. We make it easy to protect, manage, and derive value from data – across the data center, edge, and cloud. We offer a full suite of services consolidated on one multicloud data platform: backup and recovery, disaster recovery, file and object services, dev/test, and data compliance, security, and analytics – reducing complexity and eliminating mass data fragmentation. Cohesity can be delivered as a service, self-managed, or provided by a Cohesity-powered partner.

© 2021 Cohesity, Inc. All rights reserved. Cohesity, the Cohesity logo, Helios, and other Cohesity marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cohesity, Inc. in the US and/or internationally. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

Written by Sarah Doherty, Product Marketing Manager at iland Cloud.

Time to Focus on Disaster Recovery

When critical information or communication systems are not working properly, it is much more than just an inconvenience for an organisation. The following can and may happen which can be detrimental to any business:

• Weakened customer trust
• Missing or corrupted digital records or legal documents
• Lost revenue
• Decrease in productivity

These can all happen during natural disasters as we have seen frequently during the past year, but also business as usual has forever changed with the pandemic of 2020. Business critical systems may shut down or be unavailable for any period of time which can have devastating cost effects to any business. In addition, there is an increased need for new business practices relating to remote workers, unavailable tape backups, etc. It is vital to the well-being of any organisation to have a solid disaster recovery plan. Although, even with all of the disruptions during this year, it still appears that many CIOs are not readying their companies for the next disastrous event. The need for business critical and customer-facing systems to be ready for whatever may happen now and in the future needs to be addressed in any IT plan.

Organisations need to consider the impact and cost of downtime when preparing for any type of disaster. Unexpected IT outages can have both direct consequences both short and long term. These direct losses can involve:

• Lost sales revenue
• Lost employee productivity due to malfunctioning systems or Internet (think in terms of salaries and benefits)
• Potential employee overtime costs to meet deadlines following a period of disruption
• IT recovery costs
• Cost of restoring IT systems (some data may be forever lost)
• Supply chain ripple effects
• Where applicable, compliance violations or materials lost

While this list may in no way be exhaustive, it begins to demonstrate the reasons why downtime can be so devastating. It is also important to remember that there are also other intangible effects that may be harder to quantify with a dollar amount. These include:

• Customer dissatisfaction
• Low employee morale or turnover due to stress/consequences of downtime
• Brand/loyalty damage

According to a survey done by The Ponemon Institute:

The average downtime across industries costs a company $5,600 per minute.

The average reported incident length was 90 minutes, resulting in an average cost per incident of approximately $505,500.

For a total data centre outage, which had an average recovery time of 134 minutes, average costs were approximately $680,000.

For a partial data centre outage, which averaged 59 minutes in length, average costs were approximately $258,000.

The report cited the highest cost of a single event at about $1 million (more than $11,000 per minute).

No matter what the cause, downtime impacts more than just day to day operations. Some operations may survive some data loss, but others are dependent on data sharing, or are required to archive information to meet strict audit, regulatory and compliance requirements. It is important to remember that businesses that have a global workforce that collaborate around the clock, or provide services 24/7, also cannot afford any type of data loss.

It is inevitable that everyone may experience a system failure, outage or complete site disaster at some point during their career. Organisations may have a full or partial disaster recovery plan in place, but it really needs to be addressed as to whether that plan can recover critical applications and data in a timely manner in order to meet corporate business continuity requirements as well as customer expectations? Now is the right time to review priorities and be sure that there is the right plan in place to meet any business needs.