Leading Norwegian Service Provider Grows Business with Cloudian Ransomware Protection and Data Sovereignty

Move AS, a Norwegian IT consulting company, system integrator and service provider, has seen increasing concerns from customers about ransomware and data sovereignty. To help address these concerns, early last year it launched a new storage service offering based on Cloudian’sHyperStore object storage. The service provides Move ASclients with limitlessly scalable and highly cost-effective sovereign cloud storage that includes data immutability for ransomware protection. As a result, Move AS has been able to deliver even greater value to customers and profitably expand its business.

Increased Demand for Ransomware Protection and Data Sovereignty

Based in Oslo, Move ASdelivers cutting-edge expertise, services and solutions to government organizations andprivate companies throughout Norway. Over the past two years, Move AS has seen a growing demand for better solutions to protect against the proliferation of ransomware and also ensure data sovereignty.

“There’s been a lot of focus on ransomware, with more and more organizations—and even boards of directors—asking how they can best protect themselves and ensure they can quickly restore operations if they’re compromised,” says Pål Halvor Øvernes, CTO for Operations at Move AS.

Seeing an opportunity to help, in early 2021 the company decided to offer S3-compatible Storage-as-a-Service.

“At the time, we had already been reselling Cloudian HyperStore, so we were very familiar with the solution’s many benefits, including the fact that it was easy to set up and manage,” says Halvor Øvernes.“In addition, because HyperStore integrates seamlessly with Veeam, which most of our customers use, we were confident it would provide the right foundation for our new service offering.”

Move AS initially deployed 1.2 PB of HyperStore across its three data centers.

Data Immutability Through Cloudian’s S3 Object Lock

In conjunction with Veeam backup software, Cloudian’s S3 Object Lock creates immutable data backups, preventing the data from being altered or deleted for a specified period of time. As a result, cyber criminals are unable to encrypt that data with ransomware, enabling users to recover the unchanged backup in the event of a ransomware attack and quickly resume operations without having to pay ransom.

“We can easily offload data from Veeam, create a storage bucket and set a customer-defined immutability period,” says Halvor Øvernes. “This means ransomware protection is provided automatically as part of the backup workflow.”

Cloudian has also enabled Move AS to offer a modern storage service that provides the scalability and flexibility of global hyperscalers’ offerings while ensuring data sovereignty.

“Most of our clients are public entities, either government agencies or municipalities, and they need an alternative to the hyperscalers, with their data kept in Norway and managed by a Norwegian-based company,” Halvor Øvernes explains. “Cloudian’s cloud-native HyperStore platform allows us to deliver the samebenefits as hyperscalers, and more, in a sovereign cloud service.”

As an example of how Move AS can perform even better than hyperscalers, Halvor Øvernes cites one of Move’s largest customers that was using a global cloud provider for disaster recovery but found that recovering data from the cloud was taking too long.

“The customer asked to run a test with our storage service to assess our performance and was amazed,” he says. “We were able to saturate their internet connection and ended up having to stop the test so other users in the company could get their work done!”

Greater Customer Value and More Business Growth

Move AS currently has approximately 30 customers using its Cloudian-based storage service and expects to continue adding more. In fact, the company has nearly used up the Cloudian capacity it initially purchased and is planning to purchase another 400 TB.

One customer, turned to Move AS after suffering a ransomware attack, losing all their data and being down for two weeks.

“We helped them to implement a ransomware protection and disaster recovery solution to prevent this from happening again, using a local data copy on-premises and an immutable backup at Move,” Halvor Øvernes explains. “This is just one example of how Cloudian has provided the foundation for us to drive business growth and profit by delivering greater customer value.

“Organizations clearly see the value of having an offsite backup repository that protects their data from ransomware and like that they can pay for the service under the consumption model pricing we offer. From our standpoint, HyperStore is easy to use and manage and has a strong technology foundation that Cloudian continues to enhance.”