Rodriguez knew the city’s backups were reliable thanks to regular testing, but he did not know how long it would take for the restoration.
“Although we had done plenty of test restores, we hadn’t really done a major restore of this fashion,” Rodriguez says of the emergency. “We worked all night and didn’t go home.”
The next day, after talking to Veeam representatives, Sarasota conducted an Instant VM Recovery, which allowed them to mount a virtual machine image to a production host from a compressed and deduplicated backup file.
“By doing instant restores, we were able to get back two servers almost immediately,” Rodriguez says. “We had restored a third server manually. That allowed us to bring all the data back online within 14 business hours.”
Corona, Calif., Pushed Key Apps to the Cloud
When Chris McMasters became CIO of the City of Corona, Calif., several years ago, one of the first conversations he had was with the police chief, who wanted to know how the city was going to protect itself from a ransomware attack. At the time, ransomware was shifting from targeting corporations to governments, especially police departments.
McMasters accelerated the city’s shift to Microsoft Government Cloud, including using Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery to protect mission-critical applications and data. “That was definitely one of the reasons we went with Azure — for the continuity we could have to restore very quickly and not have to pay ransom,” McMasters says. “That is also how we set priorities. We pushed mission-critical apps to the cloud first.”
Corona is a city of approximately 167,000 in Riverside County. When McMasters arrived, he saw that the backup was only a mile away, while most of the applications were hosted on-premises. “That alarmed me,” he says. “What happens if we have an earthquake? The San Andreas Fault is not that far from here. Having the backup just on the other side of the freeway wouldn’t help us much.”
His effort to find a new backup solution dovetailed with other changes he wanted to make with Microsoft at the outset. “We went to Office 365 and OneDrive and pushed our critical infrastructure — Active Directory and Domain Name System environments — into the cloud first,” McMasters says.