Origin Property quickly and completely recovers from a ransomware attack with Cohesity

The Challenge

Origin Property Public Company Limited is Thailand’s premier real estate company. This highly successful property management company has grown rapidly since its inception in 2009. In 2020, Origin launched a total of 10 new condominium projects worth over 13,300 million Thai Baht ($384.50M USD). With the ever-increasing number of properties under management, the amount of data that needed to be managed skyrocketed as well.

Origin stores all of its customer and enterprise data at a large data center located in Bangkok, Thailand, and backs up all data to the company’s geographically separated disaster recovery site every night for data security. “We store many different types of data, including our enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, customer databases, development data, and other core business applications at our company-owned facilities,” says Sirawut Chanthasangsawang, Senior Vice President (SVP) of System Information Technology at Origin. “If we ever lost any of that data, it could be catastrophic for our company.”

Origin had been relying on a legacy backup and recovery solution for many years. “Our lengthy data protection windows were a significant challenge,” says Chanthasangsawang. “It was taking us more than 20 hours to complete all of our nightly backups. We also had concerns about our level of data security, and the existing solution was not easy to scale in the midst of our rapid growth.”

Origin’s IT team decided to look for a new data security and management solution in 2022 that would enable them to reduce backup time, improve data security, simplify scalability, and recover rapidly as they continued to expand.

Like so many other companies today, Origin was the unfortunate target of a ransomware attack in 2022. They thought that their data was insulated and protected from hostile attacks, but the company’s legacy data protection software proved to be inadequate in preventing or recovering from the ransomware attempt. “Ransomware was attacking our primary storage by using an API to completely delete all of our volumes,” says Chanthasangsawang. “The intruders were encrypting all of our data repositories from our previous backup software, making them completely unusable for recovery.”

When the attack began, all of Origin’s databases, servers, and applications immediately came to a complete standstill. “We initially panicked when we thought that all of our data had been lost,” says Chanthasangsawang. “We would have been unable to recover unless we paid their ransom demands.”

The Solution

Luckily for Origin, the company had just initiated a proof of concept (PoC) with Cohesity’s data security and management platform. “Cohesity was absolutely instrumental in recovering and restoring our entire environment,” shared Chanthasangsawang. “All of the recovery happened from our PoC as the shipment we had just ordered from HPE had not arrived at our data center yet. Cohesity enabled us to retrieve all of our data within three hours! Without Cohesity, we would have ended up paying the ransom to get our data back. It turns out there was no impact to our business because the recovery completed on Saturday when none of our employees were working.”

Cohesity was absolutely instrumental in recovering and restoring our entire environment. All of the recovery happened from our PoC as the shipment we had just ordered from HPE had not arrived at our data center yet. Cohesity enabled us to retrieve all of our data within three hours! Without Cohesity, we would have ended up paying the ransom to get our data back. It turns out there was no impact to our business because the recovery completed on Saturday when none of our employees were working.

Sirawut Chanthasangsawang

SVP of System Information Technology, Origin Property Public Company Limited

The Results

Cohesity not only provided recovery from the ransomware attack quickly and completely, it has enabled Origin to shorten data backup windows from 20 hours to just under three hours. The Cohesity solution has also resulted in a much lower TCO than the previous data protection software.

All of the Origin customer and enterprise data is currently stored at the company’s primary data center, but the IT team is planning to move some of its customer workloads to the cloud in 2023. “Cohesity will enable us to seamlessly protect all of our data─whether it’s located in our data centers or up in the cloud, with one powerful data protection solution,” explained Chanthasangsawang.