Wenatchee Valley College Evaluates IT Environment After Local College Hit with Ransomware

(BUSINESS WIRE)-- ExaGrid®, the industry’s only Tiered Backup Storage solution, today announced that Wenatchee Valley College switched to an ExaGrid-Veeam solution for superior data protection and to implement a strategy for ransomware recovery.

Wenatchee Valley College enriches North Central Washington by serving educational and cultural needs of communities and residents throughout the service area. The college provides high-quality transfer, liberal arts, professional/technical, basic skills, and continuing education for students of diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds. The Wenatchee campus is located near the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains, midway between Seattle and Spokane. The WVC at Omak campus is located near the Canadian border in Omak, about 100 miles north of Wenatchee.

“A college in our system suffered a massive ransomware attack and all of their servers were impacted, including their backup data, so they couldn’t recover anything. We’ve used their experience as a case study to improve on the areas that they were weak on, the root causes of how it happened, when it happened, and what led up to that ransomware - then made changes to our environment and instituted best practices. Now, even if we are impacted, if our VMware environment and our servers are impacted, we know that the ExaGrid data will not be impacted,” said Steve Garcia, the college’s Information Security Officer. “We scrapped our old solution and went with an ExaGrid system and Veeam, which tied in nicely with our VMware infrastructure. The combined solution of ExaGrid and Veeam is amazing! They work very well together. Now that I’ve used the ExaGrid-Veeam solution, I’ve recommended it to colleagues at other community colleges as a solid, reliable solution for any backup infrastructure needs.”

ExaGrid provides Tiered Backup Storage with a front-end disk-cache Landing Zone and separate Retention Tier containing all retention data. Data is written directly to the “network facing” ExaGrid disk-cache Landing Zone, then it is tiered into a “non-network facing” long-term retention repository where it is stored as deduplicated data objects to reduce the storage cost of long-term retention data. ExaGrid’s approach to ransomware is called Retention Time-Lock. It prevents hackers from deleting or encrypting backups in ExaGrid system’s retention tier. ExaGrid has the only non-network-facing tiered backup storage solution (a tiered air gap) with delayed deletes and immutable deduplication objects. This unique approach ensures when a ransomware attack occurs, data can be easily recovered or VMs booted from the ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage system. Not only can primary storage be restored, but all long-term backup retention data also remains intact after a ransomware attack.

“It offers peace of mind knowing we have a robust backup system, and that if we are attacked by ransomware, we will get our data back and can resume normal operations. We take precautions to make sure when that does happen—I used to say if that happens, but it’s a matter of when now, from my perspective—when that happens, we can recover and we can get our end users back to their day-to-day operations with all their data,” said Garcia.

Read the complete Success Story to learn more about Garcia’s experience using ExaGrid. ExaGrid’s published customer success stories and enterprise stories demonstrate how satisfied customers are with ExaGrid’s unique architectural approach, differentiated product, and unrivaled customer support.

About ExaGrid

ExaGrid provides Tiered Backup Storage with a unique disk-cache Landing Zone, long-term retention repository, and scale-out architecture. ExaGrid’s Landing Zone provides for the fastest backups, restores, and instant VM recoveries. The retention repository offers the lowest cost for long-term retention. ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture includes full appliances and ensures a fixed-length backup window as data grows, eliminating expensive forklift upgrades and product obsolescence. Visit us at exagrid.com or connect with us on LinkedIn. See what our customers have to say about their own ExaGrid experiences and why they now spend significantly less time on backup in our customer success stories.

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