Dualite Sales and Services Inc. defeats ransomware and quickly restores operations with Unitrends Recovery Series

The Challenge

During the “bad old days,” as Chris Rolke jokes, Dualite had four separate tape systems running Arcserve and backups were slow. “I was running backups solid—there was no time that nothing wasn’t running—and you know you get that ugly feeling when your backup spans multiple tapes.” As the IT Director of Dualite, Rolke knew it was only a matter of time before a tape failure or issue due to the long backup windows caused a serious loss of data. In 2015 he upgraded his backup system to a Unitrends Recovery Series appliance.

Rolke was impressed with the simplicity of setting up the Unitrends appliance as well as the service provided by his onboarding technician. “I sent a question by email and he called me within 30 seconds. That really sold me on Unitrends with regards to the quality of support.”

The new Unitrends backup appliance saved Rolke tons of time in a busy day that would otherwise go into anything from changing a toner cartridge to working on an Oracle database. “With Unitrends, it really is set it and forget it. I take five minutes in the morning to go through and check that everything ran the night before. I get notifications anytime a backup job doesn’t run right, then I take 30 seconds to rerun it.”

“We were fully functional by Monday morning. Quite honestly, I don’t know what would have happened to the company if we didn’t have Unitrends.”

Rolke notes, “I have the confidence that all the data is there. Before Unitrends, I was having to guess if a backup was complete.”

His confidence was put to the test in June 2020 when Rolke experienced one of an IT administrator’s worst nightmares—a network-wide ransomware attack. “I was planning on doing a restore of our test environment after hours. I started on it around 8 pm and when I got started moving data, I had a massive headache. I went to bed around 10:30 pm and set an alarm for 2 am to start the reload. At 2 I woke up and couldn’t get into the network the normal way. I used a different way to get in and everything was running slow. I start looking around and saw files were encrypted. I break out in a cold sweat and pinched myself to make sure I was not having a nightmare. Nope, I wasn’t. Our entire network was compromised. A massive ransomware attack had hit everything. I drove to the office and was in the door by 3 am. I started pulling network cords to isolate what was left.”

“Once I could figure out what was going on and how to fix it all, I had to come up with a game plan. I started with servers and was slowly able to figure out how to get things taken care of.”

Rolke started doing restores in the Unitrends user interface. “It just started happening. As far as Hyper-V restores, it was just like ‘Boom, they’re back!’ I’m like wow, this is really cool. At that point it was okay, getting our files back, getting engineering files back, getting application servers, etc. I jump back in and I was able to remote access back in from home and verify and see Oracle data. I felt like someone gave me a billion dollars at that point. With the way I have our Unitrends set up, we’re doing hourly Oracle backups. I was able to get no loss of data for the ERP system for that entire day, which was phenomenal at that point. The worst was over.”

After discovering the attack at 2 am, Rolke was able to restore to the point in time of 8 pm the night of the attack, with minimal data loss.