Oceanscan survives ransomware attack thanks to iland (Image Credit: Arvind Vallabh on Unsplash)Oceanscan, a supplier of equipment and personnel to the oil and gas industry, has successfully navigated a ransomware attack. The attack occurred in September 2021 and affected Oceanscan’s entire network. The attack threatened to shut the company down for a significant period of time unless it paid up or had a way to restore its systems.

Rather than pay up, the company instantiated its disaster recovery process. At the core of that process were iland Secure Cloud DRaaS for Veeam and iland Secure Cloud Backup for Veeam Cloud Connect.

Sukumar Panchanathan, group IT manager at Oceanscan (Image Credit: LinkedIn)
Sukumar Panchanathan, group IT manager at Oceanscan

Sukumar Panchanathan, group IT manager at Oceanscan, said: “I cannot stress this enough: We are where we are thanks to the technology and, perhaps most importantly, the people over at iland.

 “There’s a lot that has to happen in the wake of an attack like this. It’s a tough time. But the iland support team immediately answered our call and we were in a position to recover with just the click of a button. The iland services have been absolutely wonderful. From the bottom of my heart, I cannot thank the iland support staff enough.”

What did Oceanscan do?

The ransomware attack prompted an immediate review of Oceanscan’s IT environment. It faced the choice of trying to clean existing on-premises servers and systems, buying new hardware or moving to the cloud.

Oceanscan decided that the best long-term approach was to move to the cloud. Its existing environment was already backed up in the cloud through the iland Secure cloud tools. The next step was to move from iland DRaaS to iland IaaS. This took the company a couple of hours and said it has been running effectively ever since.

Enterprise Times: What does this mean?

Ransomware attacks have been devastating for many businesses. Few have prepared properly for them and are faced with paying up or trying to restore their way out of the problem. Unfortunately for many businesses, the only option they have is to pay.

That is what makes this story interesting. Oceanscan could have paid up. Instead, it did proper preparation and planning to recover from an attack. In reality, this wasn’t just about ransomware. It was about the ability to recover from a disaster, something that all companies should do but don’t.

The second interesting part of this is the decision not to restore to a new on-premises environment. While many organisations are still debating how much of their environments to move to the cloud, Oceanscan went all in. Granted, they were pushed that way by the attack. However, being able to use their existing cloud DRaaS and turn that into a cloud-based solution in a matter of hours is impressive.

For iland, this is a great case study that, hopefully, they will give more details about in time. It should certainly allow the company to open up conversations with other customers.

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