Micromix Plant Health Ltd, an R&D-based plant nutrition specialist retailer manufacturer based near Nottingham, suffered a ransomware attack in May 2016. It eradicated the organisation’s IT, encrypting everything from email to ten years of company data. As a result, the firm urgently required an IT provider that could assist with disaster recovery and the rebuilding of its IT infrastructure to prevent any further attacks.
The firm was already exploring options to move its on-premise IT to the cloud, before the ransomware attack, but the attack made the migration happen much quicker. It had become apparent that its IT provider had failed to back-up the system effectively and was not managing the scale of the problem. In an attempt to rectify the issue, it had in fact erased most of the encrypted data, leaving the business with nothing.
After engaging Netmetix, a cloud provider and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, the priorities included the recovery of the lost data and the decryption of that data once recovered, but due to the lack of back ups there was no unencrypted data, leaving no choice but to pay the ransom. Netmetix then began to build a system to ensure the protection of Micromix’s data from the efforts of any other attackers. It transferred Micromix’s IT system to the cloud, providing the company with a Microsoft Azure based platform, supplying security, disaster recovery, a resilient IT, and enabling the business to facilitate more agile working through remote access. It took just 24 hours for Netmetix to have the core business functions up and running again, with the whole IT infrastructure in place in three days.
Charlotte Hall, Operations Manager at Micromix says: “As a relatively small business, we felt that a cyber-attack was unlikely ever to happen to us. The result was, when we were hit by ransomware, just about everything that could go wrong, did, and our incumbent IT provider did not have the expertise to deal with it. Netmetix addressed the issues so quickly and minimised the business impact of the cyber-attack, we feel much happier that we are protected against future threats. Also, from an operations point of view, by moving to the cloud, we have also been able to create an IT infrastructure that is far better suited to serving our growing business needs.”
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