Case Study: Mineral Resources upgrades its critical data protections

Mineral Resources faced an aging backup solution and concerns around the growing ransomware attacks hitting Australian businesses.

The company needed a data security solution to help transform its backups into a reliable last line of defence.

Erle Metcalf, IT infrastructure manager at Mineral Resources (MinRes) told Digital Nation how the company was able to introduce a platform where operations could be restored in a brief timeframe as opposed to days, weeks, or even months.

“When we were looking at this new backup and disaster recovery platform, we had a need driven around expiring licensing, as well as end-of-life equipment.

“We had to look at a bit of a backup refresh project, which when we decided to go down this path, we wanted to do more than just backup and disaster recovery.

“We wanted to look at a cyber resilience piece. When we had a potential cyber incident, all we needed to do was have confidence in our system to restore it as quickly as possible.

Metcalf said traditionally, when people go through a cyber incident “they don't know when they've been compromised.”

He explained once the new Rubrik system was in place it removed the need to have a “clean room” to restore, sanitize and restore compromised data.

“We could go back with absolute confidence in our platform and restore it within the shortest time frame. Which reduces the costs, reduces the time frames, outages and downtimes that are there from a potential cyber-attack.

Metcalf said the modern system makes sense over its former process of using cassette tapes.

“Previously, we had a traditional backup platform which derived of a backup, some tapes and then we'd have those tapes stored off-site.

“To store the tapes, it costs us money to have those stored in a specific air-conditioned and climate-controlled room.”

Over time, the business would have to continue buying tapes- invertedly increasing storage costs.

“What we found was when we were doing backup testing, when we went back to do our testing, it would take 24 to 36 hours before we could get the correct tape. We found that we had index issues and the timing for it became very excessive.

“It made so much sense just to go down a modern backup approach, which is the almost next-generation level of backup and disaster recovery,” Metcalf said.

Metcalf explained as work moved through upgrading its legacy platform the team also faced no disruptions.

“We had a very tight timeframe. The backup vendor’s license or their subscription was about to finish up or end the subscription.

“We managed to keep all of our continuity of all of our backups, so we're still going from the legacy backup to the new backup. We didn't have any gaps between that part with the implementation.

“It took us an entirety of two days to replace the whole backup platform. Most of that was driven around like racking and stacking and configuring the network component of Rubrik.

According to Metcalf, it took the team “about half a day to configure everything”.

“We can have a good understanding from a forensics perspective if we ever need to have a cyber threat come in.

“We also have that threat hunting capability, which goes through and checks all of our backups, so if a new threat appears, we can actually go back and scan and go back to that point where it starts to appear.

“Then we can restore at that point and then after that, we take that data to a clean room. But we can have the business back up and running within a very short timeframe.”

Metcalf added MinRes staff have also welcomed the changes stating they can “now spend more time focussing on other issues” over “having to be a backup engineer”.

Next on the agenda for the company includes “mobilising out to sites and having edge nodes” plus “expanding the capability of Rubrik so we can see more information and protect more information”.