INDUSTRY: RETAIL | ACRONIS® CASE STUDY

Ready Honda Recovers from Ransomware with AcronisCanadian Car Dealership Avoids Crippling Malware Attack with Acronis Backup and Private Cloud

SECTORCar Dealership

KEY CHALLENGES• Risk to customer service and sales• Risk of downtime and data loss • Ransomware threat• Inefficient public cloud backup

solution

KEY REQUIREMENTS• Ability to store backup in

a remote location• Quick backup and recovery• Ability to use private cloud

infrastructure for backup storage

IT INFRASTRUCTURE• 4 VMware virtual hosts• 9 virtual machines (Windows Server

2008 and Windows Server 2012)• 70 users• Key Applications: Microsoft SQL

Server, Microsoft Exchange, Payroll Time Clock

• Infrastructure Servers: Microsoft Active Directory, DNS, DHCP server

KEY BENEFITS• Fast recovery• Ease of use• Centralised management

for all servers• Cost-effective licensing • Backup monitoring and reporting• Complete recovery from

ransomware attack in less than 2 hours

Business summaryReady Honda is an established car dealership in Mississauga, the sixth largest city in Southern Ontario, Canada. Founded in 1951 by Eric Redinger, the company has a rich history of dealing in European and Japanese vehicles, taking pride in providing top-quality customer service and after-sales support. The dealership has won numerous coveted industry awards and developed ongoing relationships with thousands of customers.

Business ChallengesReady Honda recently migrated its physical servers into a virtual environment for extra flexibility, but the virtual machines lacked the level of data security the company required. The dealership faced the constant risk of losing data and prolonged downtime due to manual data recovery.

Prior to selecting Acronis, Ready Honda had used Symantec Backup Exec to back up and store protected data in the cloud. However, with its growing infrastructure and ever-increasing amount of data, the company found the use of Symantec no longer cost-effective.

In response, the company decided to install a private storage server in one of its buildings and use it as a remote location to store backups from other servers. To make this setup work, it had to find a new backup solution with a flexible licensing model, a unified management console and the ability to run backups from the remote server. The key task was to protect the entire infrastructure across multiple business locations.

In its 65 years in business, Ready Honda had experienced several costly hardware failures and data loss incidents. The new solution had to provide secure backup, storage and disaster recovery that would enable local IT staff to recover virtual machines within the company’s Recovery Time Objective of less than 4 hours.

The SolutionAfter careful examination, Ready Honda selected Acronis Backup, installing the software on a Windows Storage Server in the remote location and connecting it to the virtual machines through VMware vCenter.

To optimise bandwidth usage when transferring backups to the storage server, the virtual machines were set up with separate backup tasks running consecutively throughout the night.

The system has already proved to be useful. At the beginning of 2016, the company fell victim to a ransomware attack, malware which encrypts hard drives and solicits an online payment

in return for the decryption key. Ready Honda faced the prospect of paying this hefty ransom or losing the data on its compromised virtual machine. Instead of paying the ransom, the internal IT staff erased the infected machine and created a fresh copy from a backup. The entire process took less than two hours and no data was lost.

Acronis Backup is easy to use and eliminates the complexity of virtual environment protection. Using Acronis award-winning imaging technology, it creates an exact image (backup) of each virtual machine, including guest operating systems, configuration files and applications, resource pool / vApp properties and datastore settings. It then provides the ability to recover this backup to either the original host or a new ESX (i) host.

The system comes with a centralised dashboard which among other features enables starting a virtual machine directly from a backup without performing an actual restore, making the VM operational in less than 60 seconds after the failure.

«We selected Acronis for its easy implementation, simple restore procedure and flexible licensing structure. We installed the entire system ourselves without any help from the outside. It’s great to know that in the case of a failure, we can restore our servers within seconds. Now we have a system that protects the data our business depends on,» said Alan Finlay, Fixed Operations Manager at Ready Honda.

About Acronis

Acronis sets the standard for hybrid cloud data protection through its backup, disaster recovery, and secure file sync and share solutions. Powered by the Acronis AnyData Engine and set apart by its image technology, Acronis delivers easy, complete and affordable data protection of all files, applications and operating systems across any environment—virtual, physical, cloud and mobile. Founded in 2003, Acronis protects the data of over 5 million consumers and 500,000 businesses in over 145 countries. With more than 100 patents, Acronis products have been named best product of the year, and cover a range of features, including migration, cloning and replication. Today, Acronis solutions are available worldwide through a global network of service providers, distributors and cloud resellers.

For additional information, please visit www.acronis.com

About Ready Honda

Ready Honda maintains a large inventory of new and used cars, trucks and used SUVs from Honda, Acura and other quality manufacturers. Located at 230-260 Dundas Street East in Mississauga, Ontario, Ready Honda was established in 1951 and has a long reputation of offering quality cars and trucks to its many satisfied customers in Mississauga, Toronto, Brampton, Oakville, Burlington, and throughout Southern Ontario, Canada.

Copyright © 2002-2016 Acronis International GmbH. All rights reserved. “Acronis” and the Acronis logo are trademarks of Acronis International GmbH. Other mentioned names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners and should be regarded as such. Technical changes and differences from the illustrations are reserved; errors are excepted. 2016-07

INDUSTRY: RETAIL | ACRONIS® CASE STUDY