Florida Peninsula Insurance Leverages RackTop’s BrickStor SP Solution for Enhanced Protection from Ransomware and Insider Threats
Insurance Provider Improves Data Security, Recoverability, and Compliance to Effectively Manage and Monitor Multiple Cyberstorage Platforms
Pain Points
- Vulnerability to ransomware and insider threats
- Lack of visibility into network file access and user behaviors
- Expensive archived data storage costs
- Complex data management and monitoring processes
Situation
Cyberattacks on the insurance sector are on the rise as companies increasingly migrate toward cloudbased channels to meet customer expectations, expand service capabilities, and operate safely in a pandemic environment. With the vast amounts of personal information providers collect from their customers, threat actors have capitalized on the industry-wide shift to digitalization as an opportunity to carry out ransomware attacks and digital extortion. In turn, the insurance sector experienced a 62% increase in ransomware incidents over the first half of 2021, with the average total cost of recovery and downtime from an attack skyrocketing from $761,000 to $1.85 million.
Florida Peninsula Insurance, a leading provider of homeowner, renter, condo, and flood insurance to more than 150,000 customers since its inception in 2005, faced that exact challenge when it enlisted the help of RackTop Systems to better protect its unstructured data from cyberattacks and insider threats. With extensive volumes of archived data, the company lacked the ability to monitor network file access and activity, as well as encrypt unstructured data and securely operate on cloud-based channels. Managing multiple storage platforms, tiering data for archive and protecting existing data was complex, timeconsuming, tedious, and expensive. The company sought a simplified solution that could streamline the process and reduce storage costs while still delivering exceptional data security.
increase
in ransomware incidents over the first half of 2021 for the insurance sector
The average total cost of recovery and downtime from an attack went from
“One of our main issues was data sprawl, where we had large volumes of archived data taking up a lot of space on very expensive storage platforms,” said Tom Herbert, Chief Technology Officer of Florida Peninsula Insurance.
“The cost of storage isn’t going down. The bigger we get, the more archived claims data we have — whether it’s photos of losses or video/audio recordings of statements from lawyers and insurers. Over 16 years, it all starts to add up. The ability to safeguard that archived data and securely transition it to a third-party storage platform was a huge need for us.”
Strategy
After consulting with RackTop representatives, Florida Peninsula Insurance participated in the RackTop Jumpstart training and enablement program, which offered a free 90-day subscription for two virtual BrickStor SP solutions that enabled Transparent Data Movement (TDM) for securing the company’s sensitive cloud archives. RackTop’s cyber analyst team provided 24/7 onboarding and training support as the company integrated the solution into its IT workflows, and customized elements of the solution to meet the company’s direct needs. “The onboarding process was simple,” said Herbert. “RackTop was able to make quick adjustments that were pretty impressive, especially when it came to data-locking on Amazon S3 so that certain archives couldn’t be deleted. Originally, that wasn’t a part of their capabilities, but when we wanted to implement it, they were able to adapt very quickly. Within a couple days, the RackTop team had updated their code to be able to facilitate that feature.”
Results
Florida Peninsula Insurance determined during the 90-day trial that RackTop’s BrickStor SP provided security capabilities such as user access visibility and security controls that previously were not attainable. The company was able to move all relevant data to an archiving solution that met record retentions specific to the insurance industry while adding compliance and user usage analytics based on historical data. Notable deliverables included:
- Active defense to prevent ransomware and insider threats in real-time
- Air gap data protection
- Enhanced unstructured data security
- Advanced forecasting of cyberstorage capacity
- User behavior auditing and analysis
- Immutable snapshots and file indexing
- Compatibility with existing hardware and systems
- Secured archives
- Amazon S3 replication
“We didn’t have a great way to filter who could access our archived data, as well as how much they could access and when they could access it,” said Herbert. “The RackTop platform gave us the ability to ensure that people weren’t downloading large amounts of data without our knowledge. From a ransomware perspective, you can’t always identify an unknown compromise until it’s too late. RackTop not only had the ability to alert us on ransomware threats, but also roll back exposed assets as well.”
restored storage capacity on its 60TB system
- Florida Peninsula Insurance
In addition, by transferring historic data to BrickStor SP with TDM, Florida Peninsula Insurance restored 70% of storage capacity on its 60 TB system to help offset high demand for archived data storage and save thousands in annual storage costs. After the initial 90-day trial period, the company decided to move forward with leveraging the solution. It has also purchased a second BrickStor SP licensing for a larger 400 TB system, with interest in consolidating its existing NetApp and Compellent storage systems into a single high-availability BrickStor SP cluster at the conclusion of the current support agreements. “The product has been flawless,” said Herbert.
The product has been flawless . . . The partnership has worked out really well for what we wanted.
“From my experience, it’s so simple to use. I’ve done NetApp administration and I’ve done Dell EMC administration. They are both solid products, but they are very convoluted and difficult to learn, whereas with BrickStor SP, it literally took 15 minutes for me to understand how it operates. The partnership has worked out really well for what we wanted.”
Contact
Phone: +1 443-276-6973
Email: RackTop info
Support: Customer log-in
Address: 8170 Maple Lawn Blvd. Ste. 180
Fulton, MD 20759 USA
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