Waste Management NZ Lockout Ransomware with Indelible

About Waste Management New Zealand

With over 70 locations and 1600 employees, Waste Management is New Zealand’s leading materials recovery, recycling, and waste management provider. Each year they collect more than 1,000,000 tonnes of waste and recycle over 200,000 tonnes.

Waste Management is continuously innovating and investing in new technology that will move Aotearoa New Zealand towards the circular economy and a carbon zero future.

The Challenge

Waste Management backup a huge amount of data and were concerned about the rising cyber threats in New Zealand.
Their biggest area of concern was the encryption and ransomware attacks that have been bringing companies to their knees around the globe.
They were seeking a solution that would improve protection against these cyber attacks through immutable storage and backup, as well as helping to meet insurance contract terms.

Waste Management already had a Disaster Recovery solution in place which would allow backup recovery to a certain time period if a data breach was identified. However, if the breach was not detected within this time period, the organisation would be severely compromised, facing significant disruption and being unable to perform to capacity resulting in financial losses. To overcome this threat, they required immutability so that data could not be deleted or altered for a pre-determined length of time. Data
immutability provides complete ransomware protection by ensuring data cannot be reencrypted, modified or deleted.

“Everybody is vulnerable, and cyber criminals can get in through the most innocuous way. All it takes is for somebody to click on the wrong link. Even though we’re doing a lot of work around educating our user base, mistakes can still happen. That’s where Indelible gives us that extra layer of security,” said Tim Felton, Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Waste Management New Zealand.

The Solution

With the recent Indelible innovation, Softsource vBridge was able to meet Waste Management’s number one requirement—immutability—in an infinitely scalable solution. This protects business critical data by allowing the company to write backups to the cloud that cannot be re-encrypted, modified, or deleted for a set period of time.

Indelible can be connected to a businesses’ existing IT infrastructure, making the implementation process fast. And since Waste Management already has Softsource vBridge backups in place, the project was completed within a matter of weeks.

The Results

The immutability of Softsource vBridge’s Indelible solution provides airtight ransomware protection to Waste Management. As well as delivering peace of mind, this also helps their IT team meet insurance KPIs such as The Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks and ensures the data is active and readily available.

“Indelible removes a large amount of stress for our team. There’s no admin overhead from our point of view and the billing is simple. Everything is working as planned, we’ve tested the solution thoroughly and we’re very happy. When I want to add immutable backups, I can do that easily and know it’s safe and can’t be changed,” said Felton.

Softsource vBridge will continue partnering with Waste Management, helping them to innovate and solve IT challenges into the future.

“The team at Softsource vBridge have a wide range of experience. They’re not just back up and DR specialists, they have people who know how to solve a broad range of IT challenges. If I go to them with a particular problem, they’ll connect us with the right people within their team and help us find the right solution. They’re extremely knowledgeable, their communication is very good, and we can rely on the project being delivered on time to the specifications we’ve agreed on,” explained Felton.