MinRes builds cyber resilience with Rubrik

The cyber threat landscape continues to evolve, with attacks not only becoming a regular occurrence, but advanced techniques including artificial intelligence being used to find weaknesses in order to break into organisations’ networks.

In that scenario, betting on a simple backup solution for disaster recovery isn’t going to cut it. For example, one of the first things ransomware raiders do when they get a foothold in networks is to map them out in order to locate where backups are stored.

Once the backups are found, ransomware criminals delete or corrupt them, and switch off operating system protection features such as Shadow Copies in Windows before encrypting the production data.

When organisations try to use backups to recover from attacks, they often find that these are not usable.

This is what was on Western Australia’s Mineral Resources’ (MinRes) mind when it looked at replacing its current end-of-life backup system with a more modern one that offered better protection and resilience.

MinRes is a mining operation with around 7000 employees, and ranks as one of the top five lithium and iron ore producers in the world. It is also the global leader in crusher contracting.

The mining company wanted to ensure that its business remained operational even if attacks occurred, having studied what happened to ransomware victims whose backup solutions were not fit for purpose and which made recovery slow and cumbersome.

Whether it was subject to a cyber attack or a data centre failure, taking several days to find the right tapes stored offsite to restore from, and embarking on a lengthy full restoration process was not an option for MinRes.

Erle Metcalf, IT infrastructure manager at MinRes, selected Zero Trust and data management specialist Rubrik’s solution as it ticked several critical boxes. First, the Rubrik solution had to be delivered on a very tight timeframe, to ensure that the MinRes systems remained protected.

Rubrik’s implementation partner was able to act fast on that requirement, standing up a proof-of-concept system in just two days, ahead of setting up a production environment.

Most of that work involved racking servers and configuring the Rubrik network component. There was no need to install agents on client systems, or to restart them.

“Once we had all that done, it only took us about half a day to configure everything, and to get it up and running,” Metcalf said.

The speed of implementation surprised MinRes engineering staff to the point that they were wondering if they were doing something wrong.

MinRes also needed confidence that should a restoration be required due a ransomware attack, they would be able to recover data fast and accurately. On a test system, MinRes engineers were able to restore a database in 15 seconds, which Metcalf said was exceptionally good.

The cyber resilience part, with fast restoration, was what MinRes and Metcalf particularly liked about the Rubrik solution.

Rubrik’s threat hunting capability goes through and checks all MinRes backups. This allows Metcalf’s engineers to go back and scan them, all the way back to the point a new threat appears.

In terms of data protection, Rubrik’s solution provides immutable backups that cannot be tampered with. Not only that, there’s an “air gap” or logical separation between Rubrik backups and the network they’re taken from, so there’s no way for attackers to access them.

Attackers that come across Rubrik protected systems recognise that there’s no easy way they can get to the backups and have in the past given up on ransom demands at that stage.

Protecting sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) with anomaly detection and threat hunting is another.

Better visibility of where data such as PII is stored on MinRes’ network was one of the biggest decision points as to why the mining company picked Rubrik. The mining company is now looking at deploying Rubrik to its edge sites so that it can see even more information and to protect it better.

With the Rubrik solution in place, MinRes no longer need a specific backup engineer role. Metcalf said the Rubrik solution is so easy to use that anyone in his team can operate it.

“They can restore platforms; they can back them up; they can add new systems. There’s no complexity to it anymore,” Metcalf said. Rubrik’s solution “just kind of slid in" Metcalf said, and integrated well, providing simplicity of use, scalability and much reduced administrative effort.

Engineering staff can instead focus on infrastructure and other issues that need their attention at MinRes. With the Rubrik solution in place, MinRes engineers can do more with fewer people, and have confidence that if anything happens, disaster recovery will be a painless process that doesn’t require specialised knowledge and experience.

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