Vössing’s Solution for File Data Protection and Ransomware

When German engineering giant Vössing began looking for a new way to store and protect its file data, the firm’s IT leaders had three specific goals. They wanted to find solutions that would improve backups of virtual machine data, accelerate restores at branch offices, and support cross-branch collaboration. This wasn’t a simple challenge, however, since Vössing’s 700 staff members are spread across roughly 25 offices.

“We were wondering how we could create an intelligent swarm of file servers that, although they are not one, act as one,” recalls Director of IT Bernd Gewehr recalls, “and that’s when someone in the room said, ‘I heard of a solution called Nasuni.’”

The full story of why Vössing deployed the Nasuni platform, read the full case study here.   But given that this is National Cyber Security Awareness Month, we’d like to focus this post around the file data protection side of Vössing’s story.

Simpler File Data Protection

The company’s prior NetApp-centric infrastructure was expensive and difficult to manage. Plus the idea of buying an extra machine to back up their primary one, and a tape library to protect them both, was outdated in the age of georedundant cloud storage. With Nasuni, files are automatically versioned to and protected in the cloud, and can be restored in minutes – without all that added hardware.

“I didn’t want to have multiple machines consuming lots of power and not generating any value,” Gewehr says. “When we learned that the Nasuni solution is just a pointer to move back to an older version, well, that was when I started smiling.”

Ransomware Readiness 

In addition to protecting its file data in the cloud, the Nasuni platform also gives Vössing a way to test its ransomware readiness. As we’ve written in this space previously, the complex, distributed, and evolving nature of ransomware suggest that even the most prepared firms will suffer an attack at some point.

Nasuni allows companies to recover quickly from these incidents, but it also gives IT peace of mind because this recovery process is testable. For instance, Gewehr and his team ran through a distributed attack scenario and successfully restored VM snapshots from minutes before the hypothetical attack. He estimates that it would take on the order of a few hours for his firm to recover, and get his engineers working again.

Freedom to Focus

Finally, Nasuni has taken the stress out of securing and protecting his company’s file data. “I don’t think about backup and restore anymore,” Gewehr says. “I had this complex topic that had kept me busy for part of my day, sometimes all day, and when we introduced Nasuni, this whole problem was solved. That freed my schedule for more important things than how to operate and backup file servers.”

Want to learn more?  Read Ransomware Defense for Multi-Site Enterprises white paper available here.