When we hear about cyberattacks, we almost always hear the bad news—but what about the good news? Cautionary tales are helpful to avoid repeating the past, but the stories of those who successfully avoid or bounce back from an event are the ones to watch. What tools did they have to rapidly recover? How did they improve their security postures without compromising performance, and what was the single most helpful thing in the wake of an event?
Read on to learn about three organizations that are successfully navigating today’s challenging security landscape with one key thing in common: their data is stored on Pure Storage® FlashBlade®.
A City Avoids Disaster after a Cyberattack
The world can’t stop and wait when a ransomware attack occurs—especially busy city infrastructures supporting thousands of citizens and operations. Getting back online is critical.
That’s why, in the immediate aftermath of a ransomware hack in December 2019, Bill Healy, the City of New Orleans’s Director of Operations for IT and Innovation made an important call. He determined that all of the City’s data needed to be tested, cleaned, and stored in a new location to prevent further attacks.
To bring the City’s 470 servers and virtual machines—not to mention its thousands of endpoint devices—back online, Healy and his team elected to replace the City’s entire storage footprint with Pure Storage. “The Pure Storage team showed up, rolled up their sleeves, and offered to help,” says Kimberly LaGrue, Chief Information Officer for the City of New Orleans. “Within days, we had new equipment on-site and started to migrate our data to Pure.”
As a part of this migration, the City leveraged Pure FlashArray™ and FlashBlade to provide both primary storage and disaster recovery alongside Veeam software. FlashArray ensures the City can replicate data to a second data center, while FlashBlade’s SafeMode™ snapshots, immutable copies, and early-detection capabilities protect the City’s data backups against new attacks in the future.
Now, the City is enjoying lowered risk and faster backup and restore capabilities. “Pure takes the weight off our shoulders,” says Healy. “We know we can retrieve data quickly and safely if we need to, with minimal disruption to services.”
Peace of Mind for Whatever the Future Holds—Both Security and Scale
Growing volumes of data are something most organizations can relate to—and many struggle to find a solution that can scale to meet that growth without compromising their ability to rapidly recover. But that doesn’t need to be the case.
Consolidated Minerals (ConsMin) Australia had already invested in FlashArray, but exploding email volumes—as well as the demand to support data operations for thousands of industry technologies—surfaced the need for an expanded data management solution. In the first six months of 2021 alone, ConsMin’s ICT team handled 4TB of content from Microsoft Office 365 (O365). The team implemented FlashBlade, a unified fast file and object (UFFO) solution, and Pure as-a-Service™, flexible consumption-based storage-as-a-service. As a result, ConsMin Australia has been able to improve backup retention times from 14 days to 7 years, achieve 100% retention of its O365 data, and reduce backup recovery times from 12 hours to 50 minutes.
According to Erle Metcalf, Principal ICT at ConsMin, “At the speed we work, we need peace of mind that our data is safe and downtime is limited in the event of a breach.” In combination with Veeam’s backup and replication tools, FlashBlade’s SafeMode feature means that ConsMin always has a secure copy of its data stored that is safe from ransomware—even if admin credentials are compromised.
The Pure-based stack ensures ConsMin’s modern storage environment will support the organization’s needs in the short term and into the future, as well. “Based on the speed in which data continues to increase, we need a solution to grow with us for years,” says Metcalf. “Pure not only exceeded our performance requirements, it freed up my team to do what they do best: innovate.”
Modernizing Backup Solutions to Keep Revenue Flowing with Pure FlashBlade
Legacy backup appliances and solutions are no match for today’s data demands. They’re too slow for effective recovery efforts, but they also limit what organizations can do with backup data when it’s fast, lightweight, and portable. It’s a security play but also an innovation play.
The applications used by the Mississippi Department of Revenue (DOR) to collect taxes and process motor vehicle registrations may keep state functions operating smoothly, but they also placed heavy demands on existing storage systems. As growing data volumes made it challenging to back up and restore important information, the DOR made the decision to adopt Pure FlashBlade.
The results are twofold: the DOR enjoys full nightly backups, including snapshots that are taken every 15 minutes and allow for point-in-time restores, if needed. Then, weekly restores for staging, testing, and development environments also give the DOR’s teams the opportunity to carry out their testing and upgrade responsibilities without impacting production.
In addition to simplifying storage tasks with a central point of management, the DOR saves nearly 40 hours of daily staff time by improving application response times.
Reflecting on these achievements, Mickey Yates, CIO of the Mississippi Department of Revenue, says, “I don’t think I can overstate the value of Pure technology and the Pure team. It’s a relationship you don’t necessarily get with other vendors, and the peace of mind makes it one of the best products on the market.”
Protect Your Data with Modern Solutions
Pure’s data protection solutions redefine how your team handles and secures its data, with offerings including Pure as-a-Service, FlashBlade, and FlashArray.
- FlashBlade is an all-flash platform for fast file and object storage that offers massive throughput and parallelism with consistent multi-dimensional performance that can easily scale to handle any sized unstructured data workloads.
- Our FlashArray solutions—including FlashArray//C, FlashArray//X, and FlashArray//XL—accelerate business results without increasing complexity.
- Pure as-a-Service delivers block, file, and object storage on a consumption basis, combining the agility of the public cloud with the speed and security of an all-flash infrastructure.
To see how these and other Pure solutions support your modern data protection needs, contact our team to arrange a product demo.
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