SpawGlass needed a new backup infrastructure to support its updated backup and disaster recovery strategy. Learn how OneXafe brought the company—and the IT team—peace of mind.
About SpawGlass
A Texas-based commercial and civil construction services provider, SpawGlass was founded in 1953 by Louis Spaw and Frank Glass, hence the name SpawGlass. With 10 offices across Texas, the company has approximately 750 employees and is 100 percent employee-owned – with ownership open to all employees. The company’s mission is to provide its clients with the absolute best construction experience.
The Challenge
After noticing the trend toward malware targeting backups the company’s primary concern was that its data could be compromised. Another major concern was, should someone get ahold of admin credentials, they could wipe out not only the company’s primary data storage, but also its backups of the data. And, with social engineering schemes and ransomware now rampant, people can unknowingly open the door to an attack at any time. To go on ensuring 24/7 continuous operations, SpawGlass needed a new backup strategy and to upgrade its infrastructure to support that new strategy.
The new backup strategy and ensuing infrastructure upgrades that the company implemented needed to ensure that its remote backup files would always be available, no matter what. “We looked at cloud provider solutions, and they weren’t practical for us,” said Keefe Andrews, SpawGlass’s IT Network Manager. “That was mostly because of the bandwidth costs associated with pushing all that data to the cloud. We needed a more cost-effective solution.”
Andrews then looked for an on-premises solution that could block an attacker’s access to the system using two-factor authentication. The company also wanted a solution that took immutable snapshots—meaning they can’t be altered or deleted—of all its data so it would be easy to recover data from a specific point in time in case a ransomware attack was successful.
The Solution
SpawGlass selected StorageCraft® OneXafe® as its backup solution because it met all of its criteria. “We liked that OneXafe offered continuous data protection by taking regular, immutable snapshots of our data,” said Andrews. “So even if our backup repository gets infected, we can quickly roll back to a snapshot taken prior to the infection and recover our data, completely intact.”
Andrews was also impressed by the level of remote assistance StorageCraft provided. “Most companies drop-ship you their hardware and charge you for coming onsite and helping with the install,” said Andrews. “With StorageCraft, a sales engineer made setup easy: he helped me configure and connect OneXafe for a proof of concept test, and helped me again when we brought it into full production.”
SpawGlass did several test runs during which Andrews actually went in and deleted some backup files to see if the backups could be easily restored via snapshots. Everything worked perfectly.
The Results
“I feel very confident in our backup strategy with the
StorageCraft OneXafe appliance in place,” said Andrews. “If a disaster or malware attack hits our company, I’m certain OneXafe is there to fall back on.” As Andrews looks ahead to further strengthen the company’s security posture, he also likes that OneXafe lets him replicate data offsite to other devices or clouds as additional backup targets.
Andrews also likes that StorageCraft gives him sensible options for adding storage as needed to fit his requirements, from flash arrays to spinning disks to the cloud. “I’m also impressed by StorageCraft’s compression and deduplication technology, which is delivering very good reduction values for the backups we’re storing on the StorageCraft hardware,” said Andrews.
The company feels it now has a solid backup plan and infrastructure with StorageCraft. “While we are always doing everything we can to prevent malware and ransomware attacks, we are confident we have an adequate insurance plan with StorageCraft technology.”
Key Differentiators
“I would absolutely recommend StorageCraft,” concluded Andrews. “Their pre- and post-sale support has been excellent, the technology is sound, and they put together a package that fit our organization’s needs and met our recovery objectives.”
