Reliability and innovation: Xopero provides cyber resilience for the manufacturing company HYDRO-VACUUM S.A.

HYDRO-VACUUM, a leading manufacturer of pumps in Poland and Central-Eastern Europe, boasts an impressive history dating back to 1862. HYDRO-VACUUM is all about innovation and reliability in the pump industry. The company emphasizes sustainability and socially responsible business practices, contributing to the achievement of the UN Agenda 2030 goals. With nearly 165 years of operation, over 400 employees at a single location, mobile sales representatives, and exports to 40 countries worldwide - these impressive results not only reflect the scale of the company’s operations but also the amount and complexity of the data processed. With growth and international expansion, HYDRO-VACUUM faced the challenge of effectively securing its complex IT infrastructure and around 120 terabytes of data. The company trusted Xopero Unified Protection for efficiency and scalability in terms of protecting constantly-increasing amounts of data, Ransomware Protection and security technologies, along with Disaster Recovery. For a manufacturing company the time required to restore systems and guarantee business continuity was a key factor in the decision-making process. Even the shortest downtime of business operations can lead to millions of losses in that industry. Xopero Unified Protection allows HYDRO-VACUUM to minimize financial and operational risks associated with downtime by providing cyber resilience, instant Disaster Recovery processes, and maintaining production continuity.

This case study shows the “behind the scenes” of implementing the Xopero Unified Protection hardware backup solution as a key element of the digital transformation strategy, thanks to which HYDRO-VACUUM can strengthen its position as a leader in the industry.

The growth of the business, international expansion and increased employment have led HYDRO-VACUUM to deal with the necessity of securing their complex IT infrastructure and up to 120 TB of data, while taking into account their dynamic growth in the near future.

It is important to note that HYDRO-VACUUM operates in one of the most cyberthreat-prone and legally regulated industries. Manufacturing companies play a crucial role in export, innovation, and productivity increase, which drive economic development worldwide. Additionally, manufacturing is inherently connected to other sectors, such as logistics, energy, and information technology. Therefore, any disruptions in the production processes can impact a range of other sectors and various areas of societal functioning. A cyberattack on a manufacturing company can have serious consequences that could extend beyond the industry and affect other organizations in the supply chain.

Over the last decade, the manufacturing sector has undergone a speedy digital transformation, incorporating innovations such as robotics, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). While these advancements drive growth and efficiency, they also expose the sector to cyber threats. Manufacturing has been identified as the most vulnerable sector to cyberattacks for three consecutive years. The World Economic Forum estimates that one in four attacks (25.7%) targets this industry, with 71% of those attributed to ransomware. Costs associated with attacks and data loss in the manufacturing sector are rising by 125% annually, largely due to unexpected operational downtime, disrupted supply chains, and contractual penalties.

HYDRO-VACUUM, setting technological and innovative trends in its industry and competitive environment, developed a digital transformation strategy with the key objective of ensuring business continuity. The company required comprehensive data protection against all threats, including hardware failures, system downtime, ransomware attacks, and human errors, as well as the ability to efficiently and quickly restore necessary systems. The previous solution used for backup no longer met the company's high standards.

The extensive IT infrastructure of HYDRO-VACUUM includes a wide range of endpoints, servers, VMware virtual machines, along with MSSQL and MySQL databases. The company processes up to 120 TB of data daily, and expects potential rapid growth in the near future. Therefore, it required a single, comprehensive solution capable of securing each of these elements, whilst guaranteeing consistency and reliability of protection at every level. Most importantly, the solution needed to meet the requirements of the Disaster Recovery plan and achieve the specified RTO and RPO targets.

Setting the standards in the industry, HYDRO-VACUUM S.A. selected the Xopero Unified Protection (XUP) hardware solution to address the challenges of data protection, Disaster Recovery, and Business Continuity (BCDR). XUP is a highly scalable protection device that combines advanced backup software with a disk array, archiving system, and deduplication appliance, offering comprehensive enterprise data protection. The device outperformed competing solutions with its fast source-side deduplication, security features, Ransomware Protection, and Disaster Recovery technologies, including Instant Restore and significantly reduced recovery time for critical systems. Excellent contact with the vendor, technical support at every decision-making stage, and smooth implementation also played a significant role.

Thanks to Xopero Unified Protection, company can fully automate and regulate its backup processes, significantly reducing the risk of data loss and minimizing even the shortest operational downtime. The built-in immutable storage technology, combined with advanced ransomware protection features, guarantee HYDRO-VACUUM with reliability, scalability, and confidence that its data is protected from both cyber threats and accidental human errors. This allowed to achieve its digital transformation goals and ensure business continuity regardless of the circumstances.

On a daily basis, the company processes 120 TB of data within a complex infrastructure consisting of databases, physical, and virtual devices. HYDRO-VACUUM needed a scalable solution that could grow with its business. Xopero Unified Protection allows the company to add additional devices as disk arrays when needed and provides extra cloud storage for replication purposes. Processing large amounts of data, HYDRO-VACUUM paid particular attention to the source-side deduplication and data compression features, which help efficiently manage disk space and optimize resource usage. Retention settings and backup rotation schemes were also crucial for the administrators, especially in the context of meeting legal requirements and ensuring compliance with data protection regulations, including the NIS 2 directive. This further strengthened HYDRO-VACUUM's position as a company ready to meet the challenges of the modern market.

HYDRO-VACUUM's previous backup practice did not provide the company with an adequate level of data security or scalability, and involved considerable amounts of administrators' time. Struggling with the rapidly growing volume of data and the ineffectiveness of existing backup solutions, HYDRO-VACUUM felt the need for an advanced and scalable system that would meet the demands of corporate data protection.

Hydro-Vacuum S.A. learned about Xopero Software solutions through a recommendation from its IT Partner, ARKANET, who recommended Xopero for its reliability and extensive security technologies. The organization was looking for a single, comprehensive enterprise-class solution, and Xopero Unified Protection fully met these expectations.

Xopero and ARKANET engineers conducted an interview about the network topology and the amount of disk space required, discussed the customer's needs and guided him through the PoC process. Finally - the implementation of the hardware, delivered in a plug & play model, took place stationary, at the customer's headquarter. Xopero engineers demonstrated in detail the system's capabilities based on the company's environment, provided technical training and, together with the company's administrators, configured backup policies for critical data and systems. They also tested several data restoration and Disaster Recovery technologies (including Bare Metal Restore and Instant Restore), including automatic restoration mechanisms. Thus, they verified the solution's compliance with the company's BCDR plan and verified its effectiveness in terms of meeting the RTO and RPO time targets. The results definitely exceeded expectations.

The company gained a guarantee of business continuity, by eliminating risks associated with even minor outages and financial or image consequences. And these in the industry are devastating - almost 57% of cyber attacks in 2022 had real physical consequences, including production disruption, the average cost of data loss in the industry is $4.73 million, and the value of ransoms paid to ransomware authors in 2023 reached $1.1 billion in the industry!

Xopero Unified Protection has become, therefore, an investment with a multi-digit rate of return when a threat, failure or downtime occurs.

Thanks to a single platform, the company has now its own hardware array where data is collected automatically, eliminating the risks associated with manual backups. HYDRO-VACUUM S.A. specialists particularly appreciate the possibility to use predefined plans and freely configure policies, which streamlines the configuration process and allows the team to focus its attention on other tasks. Another of the appreciated advantages is the ability to run predefined scripts for archiving SQL databases. In addition, the professional nature of the dedicated solution, global deduplication, compression, retention or copy rotation scheme settings give the ability to efficiently back up 120TB of data and effectively manage data storage space.

One of the decisive factors in choosing Xopero Software over other solution providers on the market was the ability to manage data protection of the entire infrastructure centrally through a single platform. The solution has a multi-platform backup agent that was installed on each protected device, which enabled central data management. With the implementation of the Xopero Unified Protection solution, company gained the ability to secure servers, virtual machines, and workstations without a license limit. A central control panel provides full monitoring of the backup process and informs the company of every action performed on the system.

Another advantage that HYDRO-VACUUM S.A. found important was professional technical support, the availability of engineers and, an efficient Customer Success department answering all questions and needs, also in Polish. This support proved to be extremely helpful during the selection of the solution, its implementation and in the post-sales period.

After implementing the Xopero solution, HYDRO-VACUUM S.A. can regularly and automatically back up and restore data in a very short period of time thanks to the proprietary Instant Disaster Recovery and Flexible Drive Restore functions, and also ensure data security even in case of ransomware attacks.

More and more often, backups are also being attacked, so the company wanted the best protection against such attacks. Xopero ensures the cyber-resistance of backups thanks to immutable storage features and the absence of executable files in the copy. Even if malware gets into the infrastructure, it won't be able to alter or delete data or run executable files. Despite great confidence in its employees, the company wanted to protect itself from accidental or intentional data deletion, since statistically the human factor is responsible for 70% of downtime. Xopero also faced this challenge with WORM (Write-Once-Read-Many) technology. To guarantee additional data security there is an option to set additional protection in the form of top-notch AES 256 encryption with its own key and Zero-Knowledge Encryption.

Every manufacturing company faces many challenges. Downtime happens frequently and can cost up to millions per minute. To protect against possible data loss and costly consequences, a simple backup is not enough - the solution must be guaranteed to be reliable. In this case study, we described how the Xopero Unified Protection solution met the needs and requirements of a leading pump manufacturer. We are pleased that our solution supports HYDRO-VACUUM S.A. in ensuring business continuity, and the company is fully satisfied.