School Defeats Ransomware With Unitrends “And Not a Penny Paid in Ransom”

The Challenge

The City of Lynchburg has been a Unitrends customer for over seven years. The city’s IT environment includes Cisco UCS servers virtualized with VMware running Windows applications. One of the city’s most challenging IT requirements is the need to meet Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for records, and data loss due to computing issues is no excuse against lawsuits. A robust and reliable backup solution is key to meeting these compliance requirements; however, the solution must meet the municipal’s limited budget.

Prior to Unitrends, the city protected its information with Veeam. Although the city purchased Veeam Standard licenses as per its requirement, Veeam initially provided the more costly Enterprise licenses as a “favor.” However, when the time came to renew the license, the City of Lynchburg couldn’t go back to a Standard license without a forklift upgrade. Veeam insisted that they pay fully for the Enterprise version if they wished to renew. The city could not afford the Veeam Enterprise license, yet they couldn’t do without data protection.

“With Unitrends Backup doing its thing every night, I just don’t worry about it anymore.”

John Piercy, the city’s senior IT architect, began searching for a replacement solution. After reading reviews, Piercy reached out to Unitrends and was pleasantly surprised to find that they had a solution that would work within the city’s budget. All the city’s Cisco UCS servers, applications and data are now protected by Unitrends Backup software.

Follow Up

Since the conversion to Unitrends, there have been no incidents where lost data couldn’t be quickly recovered. Piercy reports, “Someone operating with far too much power deleted thousands of files from a share inadvertently and did so permanently. I was able to recover them all in minutes — 2.5 minutes to be exact — from the time the user told me the path to the share. All the files were fully restored. With Unitrends Backup doing its thing every night, I just don’t worry about it anymore. The reporting is clean too. I see all that green (successful backups) and sleep easy. Our support has improved, our time-to-recovery (TTR) has improved, reliability of backups has improved, quality of reporting has improved — backup is now about as simple as it can be.”

“The reporting is clean too. I see all that green (successful backups) and sleep easy.”