Weekend Rescue

Zero data loss after a weekend ransomware attack

Cyber threats don’t keep office hours. When a client was hit by a sophisticated ransomware attack over a weekend, a disaster-recovery strategy Promax had put in place months earlier turned a potential business-ending event into a minor hurdle — with zero data loss.

The challenge: a weekend ransomware attack

Over a weekend, one of our clients was struck by a sophisticated ransomware attack. Their on-premises servers were compromised, threatening to encrypt years of critical business data. The goal of the attack was simple and severe: total business paralysis by Monday morning.

The Promax solution: resilience designed in advance

The client was protected by a strategy we had designed and implemented months before the attack — a geo-redundant disaster recovery (DR) site in Microsoft Azure:

• The firebreak: the DR site was built with strict network segmentation. Even though the local office network was infected, the ransomware could not reach the replicated servers in the cloud.
• Rapid failover: our team worked through the weekend to initiate a failover, bypassing the infected hardware and bringing the business back online in the Azure environment.
• Clean recovery: because the cloud replica was isolated and uncompromised, staff could return to clean systems rather than paying a ransom or rebuilding from scratch.

This is the difference between reactive clean-up and proactive disaster recovery: the outcome was decided long before the attack happened.

The result

By Monday morning, staff logged in and worked from the cloud with zero data loss. What could have ended the business became a minor weekend hurdle. The client was so impressed by the resilience of the cloud environment that they chose to remain in Azure permanently.

Frequently asked questions

What is a geo-redundant disaster recovery site?

It is a copy of your critical systems and data kept in a separate geographic location — in this case, the Microsoft Azure cloud. If your primary site is compromised or goes offline, you can fail over to the replica and keep working.

How does network segmentation stop ransomware spreading?

Network segmentation separates systems into isolated zones so an infection in one area cannot freely reach others. Here it acted as a firebreak, keeping the cloud DR site clean even while the office network was under attack.

How can my business prepare for a ransomware attack?

The key is preparing before an incident: isolated, tested backups, a disaster-recovery plan, network segmentation and 24/7 monitoring. Start with a free cybersecurity review from Promax.