Safeguarding utility data archives from ransomware
Florida Keys Electric Cooperative (FKEC), a not-for-profit utility serving roughly 33,000 customers, had already survived one ransomware attack. With critical infrastructure squarely in attackers’ sights, FKEC chose BrickStor SP for real-time visibility, active defense, and recovery it could count on.
Electric Utility / Critical Infrastructure
BrickStor SP
33,000
utility customers served
3 weeks
from trial to signed contract
8 TB
extended to secure cloud via TDM
10%
of industrial ransomware hit utilities (prior 2 yrs)
“With BrickStor SP, I’m more confident in my data than ever before. I know it’s there. I know it’s protecting my archives. And I know that if I have a ransomware problem, I can go in and recover very easily.”
Tamie Fox — Director of IT, Florida Keys Electric Cooperative
FKEC fell victim to a targeted ransomware attack back in 2015 — years before ransomware became a global epidemic. The utility was lucky to still be writing data to magnetic tape, which let it recover without paying the ransom. But the fear of not being able to recover never went away.
After the 2021 Colonial Pipeline attack and an attempted breach of a Florida water-treatment facility just hours away, the threat felt local and imminent. Electric utilities had been targeted in 10% of all industrial-related ransomware attacks over the prior two years. FKEC needed a scalable data-management solution that could deliver real-time visibility and access controls to proactively prevent, detect, and mitigate ransomware.
FKEC enrolled in the RackTop Jumpstart program — a free 90-day subscription to deploy virtual BrickStor SP for data-centric Zero Trust. The value was evident almost immediately: within three weeks of deployment, FKEC was signing contracts.
Because BrickStor SP layers onto existing hyperconverged infrastructure, FKEC avoided hefty replacement costs. Using Transparent Data Movement (TDM), the utility extended 8 TB of storage to a secure cloud file server, with RackTop’s technicians providing 24/7 onboarding support through a seamless deployment.
- A unified layer of defense protecting sensitive data archives from ransomware and insider threats from day one.
- Air-gap data protection, tool consolidation, and advanced cyberstorage capacity forecasting.
- Streamlined compliance — on-demand auditing and interval reporting drawn from RackTop’s immutable database, giving confidence that compliance reports are accurate to federal and state regulations.
- Real-time, actionable insight into user behavior: what files were accessed, by whom, when, from where, and why — so threats can be identified and stopped in the interface, without juggling a dozen tools.
What BrickStor SP delivered
“I can not only see what my users are doing, but also what someone posing as a user is doing as well. I can stop an attack right there in the interface. I don’t need to switch between 12 different tools.”
Tamie Fox — Director of IT, Florida Keys Electric Cooperative
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Gartner named RackTop a sample vendor when it introduced the Cyberstorage category (2021)
See the category history →ESG Economic Validation: less than half the cost of alternative NAS solutions
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Read the technical validation →Four U.S. patents on the Cyberstorage architecture
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