Eurecat US protects backups against ransomware

The Challenge

The world’s leading supplier of catalyst services for oil refineries and petrochemical plants, Eurecat US operates out of three offices, two in Houston and one in Oklahoma. Over time the business had outgrown its previous backup solution, from Quest. “Our old on-prem backup solution didn’t work about half the time and we didn’t find out about problems until we logged in,” says Michael Stegall, IT Director. In addition, the Oklahoma location didn’t have a local IT person to manage on-prem backup infrastructure. Using a separate management tool to back up M365 files took too much time. And company executives urgently wanted ransomware protection. “We’re transitioning to cloud services wherever we can, so using the cloud for data protection makes sense,” Stegall says.

The Solution

Eurecat found a single solution for on-prem and M365 backups with Cohesity DataProtect delivered as a service running on AWS. “Cohesity is more reliable than what we had before,” Stegall says. “If we get hit by a ransomware attack we can restore from an immutable backup. And with automated email alerts about backup status I find out about issues sooner.”

So far Eurecat uses Cohesity DataProtect delivered as a service to back up its Hyper-V and VMware virtual servers, M365, and dev/test data. Unlike the previous solution, which only backed up Eurecat’s SharePoint document libraries, Cohesity also backs up critical mailboxes and every employee’s OneDrive.

Stegall describes Cohesity support as “insanely good” and appreciates that the purchase price includes basic setup. “I brought in Cohesity and another IT solution at the same time,” he says. “Cohesity was ready to use within a couple of days of the first contact, while the other product took more than a month. Cohesity delivers on what they promise, and in over 25 years in IT, I’ve never had a better support team.”

The Results

Ransomware protection helps management sleep easier. Cohesity creates immutable backups that can’t be altered. “We have good security protections, but with ransomware becoming more and more prevalent we need to assume we’ll be hit at some point,” Stegall says. “Knowing we can quickly recover with Cohesity BaaS [backup as a service] without major disruption is a relief.” For extra protection Stegall uses Cohesity DataLock to prohibit deletion of the immutable backups before the expiration date, and prevents unauthorized access with multifactor authentication.

Managing all backups and restores, on-prem and M365, from one interface saves time. Email updates on backup status simplify IT operations by alerting Stegall to issues sooner than if he had to open a console. “And when I want the big picture I can see all KPIs right on the home page, drilling down with a couple of clicks to see what I need to restore,” he says. “As the only IT support for the entire company I need to work smart, and Cohesity helps me to do that.”

Employees have noticed the faster file recovery. The time to restore a virtual server dropped from 1.5 days to less than an hour, and the time to restore a file dropped from 45 minutes to less than 5 minutes. “Faster restores help to keep revenue flowing—and they’re good for me because I can get back to work faster,” Stegall says. The ability to recover lost or accidentally deleted mail folders or individual emails proved so valuable that management immediately authorized more licenses.

Developers now have confidence that they can roll back to a working version of code if a new version has issues. “With our old solution, restores failed about half the time, so developers compensated by taking extra snapshots,” says Stegall. “Cohesity BaaS is much more reliable, so developers feel freer to try out new features to improve operations and the customer experience.”