Clayton County Public Schools Protects Critical Data From Ransomware Attacks with SaaS Data Isolation and Recovery Offering from Cohesity

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Aug. 29, 2022 — Cohesity, a leader in next-gen data management, today announced that Clayton County Public Schools (CCPS) has adopted Cohesity FortKnox, a SaaS data isolation and recovery solution, to protect and rapidly recover data in the event of a cyberattack such as a ransomware attack. CCPS is the fifth largest school district in Georgia, serving over 50,000 students.

The Cohesity FortKnox SaaS offering is designed so that the school district’s critical data can easily be saved and accessed through a virtually air-gapped and immutable data copy stored in the cloud.

If the school district is hit by a cyberattack, this copy can help the district quickly recover data, avoid paying the ransom, and keep schools operating as efficiently as possible. The addition of Cohesity FortKnox also enabled the district to qualify for cyber insurance, while improving business continuity, and offering greater efficiency, time, and cost savings.

“Like many enterprise environments, we at Clayton County Public Schools were looking to update our 3-2-1 backup strategy to enhance cyber resiliency and protect against increasingly sophisticated ransomware attacks. The simplicity and convenience of the Cohesity FortKnox SaaS offering was just what we needed to achieve this while reducing operational complexity and meeting demanding SLAs,” said Kurt Pritchett, senior network engineer, Clayton County Public Schools. “With Cohesity FortKnox, we now have an isolated, immutable copy of our critical data in the cloud without having to manage an offsite data vault ourselves, saving a lot of time and budget that can be utilized to better serve our students and teachers.”

Traditional do-it-yourself offerings to create a data vault, such as shipping tape offsite or maintaining parallel infrastructure are ill suited for today’s multicloud, hybrid world. Cohesity FortKnox offers an easy-to-use, managed solution that eliminates much of the complexity and overhead of traditional offerings, while helping meet stringent recovery service level agreements (SLAs). Cohesity FortKnox helps maximize the school district’s IT resources by supplementing the IT team’s existing skill sets with proactive threat monitoring and protection combined in one consolidated interface.

“Honestly, it doesn’t get any easier than this. SaaS solutions are what every K-12 needs when you are hard-pressed to find the right talent pool. It was easy and fast to deploy and has simplified our entire environment. With Cohesity FortKnox, we were able to vault all our data to the cloud in a couple of hours without having to deal with the overhead of managing cloud storage buckets ourselves,” adds Pritchett.

Cohesity FortKnox
Cohesity FortKnox is a SaaS data isolation and recovery offering that is part of Cohesity’s Data Management as a Service portfolio of offerings that run on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Cohesity FortKnox is designed to provide an additional layer of off-site protection through geographical, network, and management isolation, while dramatically simplifying operations and lowering costs compared to magnetic-tape and self-managed data vaults.

For More Information: 

• Read more about the value Cohesity provides Clayton County School District
• Read more about Cohesity FortKnox
• Read more about Cohesity’s Threat Defense Architecture
• Read more about Cohesity Data Management as a Service