In today's threat landscape, organizations across all sectors are facing increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Recent high-profile attacks have demonstrated that no company is immune, and the consequences of a breach extend far beyond immediate data loss. This blog examines how three industry leaders—a major retail chain, a leading utility company, and a financial services giant—fortified their cyber resilience through strategic investments in advanced protection solutions.
Major Retail Grocery Chain Strengthens Defenses Following Breaches
The Challenge: A leading US based grocery retailer faced a significant turning point after experiencing a serious breach in 2023 that exposed customer data. In early 2024, they faced further challenges when a SaaS provider servicing multiple grocery chains was compromised. These incidents created substantial business disruption, with IT staff fully occupied in recovery efforts while regular operations were severely impacted.
The retailer identified that they needed a solution that would:
- Enhance resiliency for supplier data, customer information, databases, and logistics systems
- Improve overall cyber resilience against future attacks
- Provide reliable recovery points with high confidence
The Solution: After careful evaluation, the retailer implemented a comprehensive defense strategy:
- A 5-year partnership for PowerProtect Cyber Recovery with CyberSense
- Protection for 1,0 of critical data
Key Outcomes: The selection process focused particularly on the deep inspection capabilities that differentiated this solution from competitors. While many alternatives offered only metadata or signature-based analysis, the chosen solution provided byte-level analysis—a crucial distinction that ultimately drove the decision.
The "aha moment" for the retailer came when they realized the solution wasn't just another security tool but offered true deep inspection capabilities. Most compelling was the 99.99% accuracy in locating clean recovery points, with follow-up scans ensuring confidence in the recovery process. "This solution helps find threats within the castle after the wall has been breached."
Utility Giant Secures Critical Infrastructure
The Challenge: A major utility company in Asia faced unique challenges as both an energy provider and a developer of healthcare facilities. During a natural disaster in 2011, they suffered not only significant reputational damage but also devastating data loss.
Since then, protecting their data has become a priority, especially as utilities and critical infrastructure worldwide face increasing cyber threats. As a provider of essential services, they needed to safeguard:
- Customer records and billing information
The Solution: The utility implemented a 5-year agreement covering nearly hundreds of TBs of critical structured and unstructured data with opportunity for growth to cover new workloads:
Their solution featured an isolated vault completely separated from network threats, providing a "gold copy" for recovery regardless of the attack vector.
Key Outcomes: The utility valued this solution because it addressed their unique requirements following their historical data loss incident. With critical infrastructure constantly under threat and strict regulatory requirements for utilities, their selection criteria were particularly stringent
- CyberSense was positioned as a best practice for their comprehensive recovery strategy, not just another protection or remediation tool
- The solution detected data corruption after an attack with 99.99% accuracy, crucial for maintaining integrity of operational systems
- he isolated vault architecture facilitated rapid recovery completely separated from network threats
- The solution seamlessly integrated with their existing PowerProtect data protection ecosystem
- The comprehensive approach supported their mandatory 30+ year data retention requirements, essential for regulatory compliance in the utility sector
Fin Tech Service Leader Invests in Multi-Vault Protection
The Challenge: A global financial technology provider delivering investor communications, governance and compliance solutions, data analytics, and trading platforms needed to protect business-critical databases across multiple locations.
With extensive requirements for database and VM scanning capabilities, they sought a solution that would meet their exacting technical standards while aligning with their broader resilience initiative.
The Solution: Following a meticulous two-year evaluation process, the financial services leader implemented a multi-layered approach to secure their critical data infrastructure. Their database experts conducted extensive technical assessments, particularly focused on database and VM scanning capabilities that would meet their stringent requirements for protecting sensitive financial information.
The final solution included CyberSense and PowerProtect Cyber Recovery deployed strategically across four separate locations/vaults, creating redundancy while focusing protection efforts on their most business-critical databases containing transaction data, customer financial records, and proprietary trading algorithms.
Key Outcomes: The financial services leader's thorough evaluation process revealed several decisive advantages that drove their substantial investment across four locations:
- The solution met their exacting technical requirements for scanning both structured databases and virtual machines, providing detailed inspection of SQL databases containing customer financial data, trading information, and regulatory compliance records
- CyberSense's specialized content-aware functionality delivered superior detection of sophisticated attacks like data manipulation that could compromise financial transaction integrity
- The multi-vault approach aligned with their enterprise-wide budgetary framework for cyber resilience while providing geographical redundancy across their operational centers
- The solution integrated seamlessly with their existing security and data protection stack, supporting their broader initiative to enhance resilience against the targeted threats
Common Themes in Cyber Resilience
Across these three industry leaders, several common priorities emerged:
- Preparedness over reaction: All three organizations were driven by a determination to be ready for potential attacks rather than scrambling to respond after the fact.
- Deep inspection capabilities: The ability to analyze at a byte level rather than relying on metadata or signatures proved to be a decisive factor.
- Isolation as a strategy: Creating truly separated recovery environments ("air-gapped" or "isolated vaults") emerged as a best practice.
- Accuracy in recovery: The 99.99% accuracy in locating clean recovery points represented a significant advancement over previous approaches.
- Integration with existing systems: Solutions that worked within established data protection frameworks provided additional value.
The experiences of these organizations demonstrate that comprehensive cyber resilience requires more than just perimeter defenses. In today's threat landscape, the ability to detect corruption and recover with confidence has become equally critical to business continuity.
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About the Author
Rob Mossi is a senior director, product marketing, at Index Engines.
