Gila Regional Medical Center (GRMC)

The Challenge

John Little began working with Gila Regional Medical Center (GRMC) as a PC technician and worked his way up to enterprise system architect. “Staffing is always an issue for us as we tend to expand and retract rapidly, as well as the growing challenges for cybersecurity and data protection governance,” reports Little. He manages a small team that is responsible for a range of objectives, including cybersecurity, disaster recovery operations, information systems governance, and overall system improvements and upgrades.

“We had a Backup Exec solution that was implemented prior to my employment. The solution was archaic, non-scalable and didn’t really perform to my expectations,” Little says. “After reviewing several vendors and solutions, Unitrends provided not only a simple backup and recovery solution but also a solution that lent itself well to our cybersecurity and data protection policies and future plans.”

Little deployed the Unitrends Recovery Series physical appliance in the data center and another Recovery Series appliance in a secondary remote site. He also chose to utilize a Unitrends RXDA removable hard drive array to allow for the creation of physical media and easy transportation between sites.

Not long after installation, GRMC was hit with a ransomware attack. “While I can’t release details, we did have an incident involving ransomware that affected several of our systems. And utilizing our Unitrends data protection infrastructure, we were able to respond, contain and eliminate the infection, and recover in a matter of minutes!” reports Little.

“With our old data protection solution, this would have taken days.”

Follow Up

“Our Unitrends environment has, in my mind, paid for itself many times over. The ability and flexibility of the platform is seemingly endless and really allows me to fully integrate the solutions into virtually every facet of our environment,” Little reported.

“The (Unitrends) platform is so flexible it allows for a full-featured integration into our entire environment not only as a data backup and recovery system but also as a data protection and governance asset.”

GRMC has been using Unitrends solutions since 2016. The medical center also added Unitrends Forever Cloud to its IT environment for automatic, off-site cloud storage that helps the organization meet governance and compliance requirements.