We’ve said it many times before, but it bears repeating:
- Cyberattacks represent a tremendous and ever-growing threat to organizations of all types and sizes.
- It’s critical for companies to have an organized, disciplined, and comprehensive approach to risk management and adopt backup and recovery technologies that resolve those risks.
Supporting customers is about much more than a successful deployment — and the customer support team at Cobalt Iron is there for them in the not-so-great times like when cyber threats are knocking on the door and when a data disaster actually strikes. Cobalt Iron considers it part of our customer experience, anchored by the Compass SaaS data protection platform and its disruptive approach to data protection technology.
SaaS-based products are transforming customer expectations for support and service across the technology industry. Customers increasingly expect enterprise applications to be available in the cloud on an as-needed basis, and customer success teams to keep them updated on product features, functions, and best practices.
An emphasis on automated monitoring, continuous programmatic analytics, exceptional customer support and service, and successful business outcomes is in the DNA of the Cobalt Iron Compass SaaS data protection solution. Nowhere is the value of this approach more evident than in real-world situations in which Compass has helped customers recover from potentially devastating cyberattacks.
Here’s a recent example of how Compass and the Cobalt Iron team helped a customer dealing with a ransomware attack.
Compass insights provide customers critical information in an attack event
Upon indications of a cyber event, the customer reached out to Cobalt Iron for assistance. With insights provided by Compass, the Cobalt Iron team hypothesized that the attack targeted the company’s Active Directory infrastructure.
The attack was incredibly crippling to this company, preventing employees from logging into their applications (including their considerable virtual environment) and obscuring visibility into parts and materials. The customer had to shut down supply lines and cancel shifts at its plants for days, and urgency was high.
When the customer first notified the Cobalt Iron support team about the attack, we sprang into action and gave immediate directions in Compass to ensure that bad data wasn’t replicated across the environment, and that good backups wouldn’t expire in the event they were necessary.
Compass’ Cyber Shield technology had already kicked in and prevented malicious attack software from reaching the backed-up data, therefore heading off the possibility of unauthorized (and tainted) recoveries. The upshot: the Compass Cyber Shield protection capabilities and this customer’s ability to immediately leverage the support resources at Cobalt Iron allowed the company to restore clean data quickly and set additional policies to increase security monitoring.
Cyber Shield protection capabilities and this customer’s ability to immediately leverage the support resources at Cobalt Iron allowed the company to restore clean data quickly and increase security
That action would pay off three weeks later when the customer experienced a similar attack with similar scope – affecting up to a thousand Windows servers in North America.
By now, the attacker had reached out to the customer and threatened to delete backups because the customer had yet to respond with a ransom payment. With the confidence instilled by Compass protection and Cobalt Iron support assistance during the first attack, the customer again reached out to Cobalt Iron.
Once again, our team responded with full support – leveraging the power of Compass to easily take steps to lock down user ID access and forcing a password change for every user across the environment. All the while, the data backed up and always locked down with Compass remained untouched, pristine, and fully available to restore once the destination servers were up and running again.
What data protection lessons can we learn from this customer case?
Once the smoke cleared, the customer realized it needed to be more proactive about cyberattack protection – and that includes extensive testing and validation of restores BEFORE they’re needed. At the same time, Cobalt Iron worked directly with the customer to identify and prioritize product roadmap items that could enhance the security alerting and analysis features in Compass, which already stand out from the pack with patented ransomware detection and remediation capabilities. It’s a great example of how Cobalt Iron Compass is tested, proven, and refined in the fire of real-world experiences.
Although the attack did not target the backup infrastructure initially, the customer was grateful for the comprehensive and proactive data protection offered by Compass. Compass was totally resistant to the subsequent attacks on the backup data.
If this company had deployed a less powerful and sophisticated solution, the ransomware could have infiltrated the backup data and placed the customer completely at the mercy of the attackers. Compass – and the front-line support provided by the Cobalt Iron team – was critical in keeping this security incident from spiraling into a complete business disaster and a potentially embarrassing public story.
How Compass' Cyber Shield saved the customer from data loss
As an enterprise-scale data protection solution, Compass is the only data protection solution that is truly SaaS-based, multi-cloud, and analytics-driven, with award-winning Cyber Shield security features built into every deployment. As shown by this grateful customer’s experience, the industry-leading ransomware protection of Cyber Shield is targeted to helping enterprises mitigate risks, reduce costs, and get back on their feet as fast as possible when cyberattacks threaten.
Learn more about how Compass helps customers implement a successful, attack-ready data recovery strategy with:
- Role-based access
- Workload-specific environments
- Reliable, secure, and policy-based backups
- Location-independent recovery
Download this data sheet on the Cyber Shield capabilities of Compass.
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