At RWTH Aachen University in Germany, a public institution known for its science and engineering research, the university deployed a centralized multi-layer data protection approach across 7,000 systems at 42 colleges in Germany – a solution optimized with modern security requirements that delivers rapid recovery and protection against ransomware.
“Now, when we have data loss, we click on recovery and get back the data within a couple of hours,” said Thomas Eifert, CTO of the IT Center at RWTH Aachen University.
Eifert pointed out that RWTH Aachen implemented a Hitachi Vantara Content Platform distributed object storage system with Commvault backup and recovery at six university data centers. The configuration of the distributed object storage system with 72 nodes and a total of 56 petabytes of storage capacity uses geo-erasure coding to guarantee data integrity and resilience across multiple locations.
Five Lessons Learned
Here are five lessons Eifert said could help organizations looking to modernize their data protection systems to safeguard against ransomware:
- Change from a reactive to a proactive stance: In the past, IT organizations would wait until an outage or cyber incident took place and they would fix it. Today, with most organizations online all the time, they can’t afford downtime, so they really need to modernize their data protection operations.
- Adopt a federated data protection service model: The university system in Germany is very similar to a large corporation with multiple offices and facilities. Moving towards a centralized model can save on costs by not reinventing the wheel at every location.
- Convince the local IT staffs that they can keep legacy apps: Eifert said RWTH made it clear that RWTH would deliver the storage and backup as a service and the local universities could run their legacy data analytics applications. It just made sense because many of the teams have several years of expertise tied into a specific analytics applications and would find it hard to retrain or find new data analysts.
- Explain what “data is the new oil” really means: Howard Holten, CTO for IT strategy and digital transformation at research group GigaOm, said that oil has many uses beyond just powering cars, it’s used for building materials, home products and clothing. So it’s not about what the organization uses its data for today – it’s more about the many future uses of the data for business apps, especially now that AI has emerged on the scene.
- Set up a consistent refresh plan: GigaOm’s Holten said IT departments should start planning for a three-year refresh after two years because the team will need at least one year to work out all the details. By the time the third year is up, they should be ready-to-go.
Want to Learn More?
Watch the webinar Multi-Layer Protection: Deeper Defense Against Cyberattacks.
Image credit: RWTH Aachen University