Irish Farmer Journal Deploys StorageCraft OneXafe

After falling victim to a serious cyberattack in late 2020, the Irish Farmers Journal became increasingly concerned about the risk of future attacks.

The data protection solution in place at the time had proven inadequate, leading to the journal asking its MSP partner, Landmark Technologies Ltd, based in Dublin, Ireland, to recommend a suitable alternative.

The Irish Farmers Journal is a national publication that produces multiple newspapers and magazines every week, including The Irish Field, The Irish Garden and Irish Country Magazine. It publishes over 500 pages of print content a week, has an online readership of over one million and employs a workforce of 117 people.

Landmark provides expert, proactive and round the clock IT support and pride itself on taking a diagnostic approach to provide high-quality IT services to all companies, regardless of their size.

After falling victim to a serious cyberattack in late 2020, the Irish Farmers Journal became increasingly concerned about the risk of future attacks. The data protection solution in place at the time had proven inadequate, leading to the journal asking its MSP partner, Landmark, to recommend a suitable alternative.

As a long-time user of StorageCraft Technology, LLC for both its own infrastructure and that of its customers, Landmark recommended and deployed StorageCraft’s OneXafe object-based scale-out immutable NAS appliance. As a result, the journal has a reliable, impenetrable solution in place. Should they come under another attempted cyberattack, they can rest easy, knowing their data is secure thanks to OneXafe.

Challenge
In late 2020, the Irish Farmers Journal fell victim to a serious cyberattack. In addition to infecting the live data sites, the cyberattack also hit the publications’ backups and DR site, putting data across the entire organisation at critical risk. The IT team responded quickly, and with the help of Landmark, were able to recover the data and rebuild the on premise service systems over the course of ten days. Despite the relative success of rebuilding the servers and recovering the data, both Landmark and the in-house IT team at the journal, had to spend much longer than anticipated doing so.

Once the immediate situation was under control, Landmark and the Irish Farmers Journal took time to reflect on what needed to be done to reduce its vulnerability to future attacks. The journal identified several key critical factors for the new solution. Firstly, and unsurprisingly, it needed to offer exceptionally high-grade data protection. Secondly, to avoid a repeat of a dual cyberattack, there needed to be a disconnect between backup and live data. Finally, it was important that the chosen solution was fast to deploy and guaranteed business continuity.

For Derick Murphy, IT consultant at the Irish Farmers Journal, having a reliable solution was the priority: “After the cyberattack, there was understandably a lot of pressure to do all we could to ensure we would not have a repeat situation. We needed a solution that was fast and simple to deploy, and critically one that we could trust 100% of the time.”

Solution
After a short consideration period, it was agreed that the best solution for the job would be OneXafe 4412. The solution protects data with continuous immutable snapshots, which are taken every 90 seconds. These snapshots cannot be overwritten or deleted by ransomware or users, because OneXafe and its patented distributed object store prevent that from happening. All the data that is written to OneXafe can be recovered in the event of data corruption, deletion, a cyberattack, or other errors.

Following the deployment of the OneXafe appliance, the Irish Farmers Journal stores 30TB of data on its OneXafe appliance. All data is replicated offsite to Landmark’s data centre, which also uses a OneXafe 4412 appliance. The amount of data generated is expected to increase over time. Thanks to OneXafe being a scale-out solution, the Irish Farmers Journal can simply add more drives to its OneXafe, thus ensuring their system scales in tandem.

Reflecting on the decision to use OneXafe, Ken Kelleher, managing director, Landmark, says: “When we first spoke to the Irish Farmers Journal about finding a new solution, the house was effectively on fire and Derick was under a huge amount of pressure following the cyberattack. It was clear he needed fast deployment of a reliable, high-quality solution that could protect the organisation’s data against any future attacks. Having used StorageCraft solutions ourselves, and also for a number of other customers, it was a no-brainer to recommend OneXafe. It’s a solution we’d stake our lives and reputation on, so we went straight for it.”

“Using StorageCraft Technology has meant I can rest a little more easily at night. Now, when I share reports with senior management, I do so confidently, safe in the knowledge that our data is secure and protected,” said  Murphy.

Result
For Murphy, the deployment has given him peace of mind: “Using StorageCraft Technology has meant I can rest a little more easily at night. Now, when I share reports with senior management, I do so confidently, safe in the knowledge that our data is secure and protected. It is exactly the solution we needed, and I can’t thank Ken and the team enough for recommending it.”

With Landmark’s focus on customer service, Murphy’s evident satisfaction with the solution recommended by the team is a resounding success.

As Kelleher summarises: “Every organisation is different, but our role as an MSP is the same – to provide expert advice tailored to the specific needs of the business. In the case of the Irish Farmers Journal, we 100% delivered on that mission, and that is, in large part, thanks to the capabilities, reliability and exceptional quality of OneXafe.”

“When we first spoke to the Irish Farmers Journal about finding a new solution, the house was effectively on fire and Derick was under a huge amount of pressure following the cyberattack. It was clear he needed fast deployment of a reliable, high-quality solution that could protect the organisation’s data against any future attacks … it was a no-brainer to recommend StorageCraft’s OneXafe. It’s a solution we’d stake our lives and reputation on, so we went straight for it,” he added.