How one small business outwitted their hackers and saved $25,000 in productivity and expense
Overview
“You can talk about policy and why you should do certain things, but until something actually happens it’s hard to get employees to take things seriously,” says Marc Zuckerman, producer and the self-appointed ‘IT guy’ at Timeless Travel Trailers, a Colorado-based custom vehicle fabrication facility.
A malware attack on an employee’s work laptop prompted the 15-person business to rethink its’ business data backup plan. Although Zuckerman is a video producer by trade with no formal IT experience, he knew he could take on the challenge.
Protecting every device with automated data loss protection was a new approach for the company, but it came with the peace of mind for faster recovery. This was challenging because they were only protecting two computers. The company was using CrashPlan to backup a server, but a malware attack revealed the costly impact of not deploying as intended to all of the the business’s work computers. This new approach to protecting every computer with CrashPlan’s automatic data loss protection means not only peace of mind for faster recovery from future attacks but also saving IT intervention by having individual employees restore quickly on their own. “Cloud backup affords the benefits of offsite backup and transparency,” says Zuckerman.
Zuckerman turned to CrashPlan for peace of mind the business’ work is safely protected. Fast forward two years later, the company has saved valuable time and money, quickly recovering from other attacks and incidents that could have otherwise devastated the business.
The best data loss protection protects all versions of your files
Like many small businesses, most of the company’s computer usage is based on overhead and depends on the amount of work needed for each client project. Designers actively make changes to their design plans based on their client’s feedback, resulting in multiple versions of each unique design. For the past two years, the small business has been using an onsite server backup to cover both their designer and management computers, in addition to two virtual boxes for their QuickBook and MISys manufacturing software systems.
Your data loss protection strategy when employees don’t follow the rules
Timeless Travel Trailers believed storing data on a server was all they needed. Zuckerman quickly implemented CrashPlan and initiated a company data loss protection policy as a part of his added duties as IT admin. The policy relied heavily on his colleagues.
“Our company is such that we rely on our employees to do what they are supposed to do,” said Zuckerman.
With this new data loss protection policy in place and CrashPlan backing up the company’s server, Zuckerman believed this policy would provide a secure repository of files that were easily retrievable.
Online data loss protection makes it fast and easy to restore 99% of the files lost
A few months ago, an employee at the company came face to face with a malware attack. “We have regularly gone out to the backup for a file here and there that was accidently deleted or overwritten, but the largest single usage was recovering our data from a malware attack that encrypted most of our main drive before we found the source,” says Zuckerman.
The attacker formed a hole in the company’s security and encrypted everything. Because Zuckerman had deployed CrashPlan, he was able to recover over 99% of the files that were lost, about 1.5 terabytes worth of files, by going back to two days before the attack. The last 1% was located on the local drive of the infected network machine and was not set up with CrashPlan, and of course, the user was not using the network as per the company’s policy.
“Cloud backup affords the benefits of offsite backup and transparency.”
$25,000 worth of lost productivity due to malware
Thankfully, Zuckerman’s quick thinking helped stop the attacker in his tracks, avoiding the company to pay any sort of ransom. “My guess is we would have paid $25,000, including time recovering files with an IT consultant’s help, new hardware, total loss from our server, cost for time and materials of restoring the server and virtual boxes and overall lost productivity,” says Zuckerman. Without these files, the company would have lost thousands of dollars worth of designs and, ultimately, business with their clients.
“You can talk about policy and why we should do certain things, but until something actually happens it’s hard to get people to take things seriously.”
Today’s endpoint backup plan provides peace of mind
Today, Zuckerman using CrashPlan’s cloud backup to cover 2 employees computers, including his own, and is looking to expand that coverage to 8 more employee’s computers. Zuckerman has the peace of mind knowing his company’s important data is securely backed up and can be recovered quickly, no matter the emergency. “The best backup is one that you don’t need to think about until you need it.”
Customer Profile
- Industry: Automatic Design and Production
- Size: Less than 50 employees
- Device Environment: Mac
- How They’re Using CrashPlan : Protecting all designer and administration devices
- What they love: Data loss protection you don’t have to think about
Why CrashPlan.
- Simple: Easy administration and retrieval of files from any device
- Offsite Protection: Protects from disaster and prevents loss of money and productivity
- Transparent: Don’t need to think about, works in the background
- Versioning: Go back in time to the precise version of a file or folder
CrashPlan is uniquely positioned to help you prepare your business for remote work and hybrid disaster recovery solutions through cloud resources and expert backup management. Explore a free trial or contact us today.
