“Wasabi is an easy-to-use platform to help us archive our Rubrik backups off-prem into a cloud environment. It was basically plug-and-play. For three years, we have used Wasabi to ingest and quickly download data.”
– Phillip Reynolds, VP of IT at Williams & Fudge, Inc.

Overview

Williams and Fudge is a student loan collection agency with close to 300 employees. From their call center in South Carolina, the company receives placement information from their creditors and works to collect student receivables and loans on behalf of colleges and universities. Much of the data they store is personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive information, such as account and payment data, call recordings, and credit card information.

Because their existing storage solution was entirely on-premises, the company’s Vice President of Information Technology, Phillip Reynolds, made the search for a secure offsite storage solution a priority. “Our primary concern was ransomware protection,” said Reynolds. “If our admin credentials [for the on-prem storage systems] were ever compromised, someone could go in and delete or encrypt all of our backups.”

Protecting Against Ransomware with Immutable Cloud Backups

Williams and Fudge deployed a hybrid on-prem storage solution with Rubrik, a Wasabi Technology Alliance Partner, as an instant archiving appliance. They established a secondary backup with Wasabi so that whenever a backup was created in Rubrik, a second copy was automatically sent to the Wasabi cloud, “That was really the catalyst for going to something with immutable storage like Rubrik with Wasabi. With the combination of the immutable storage of Rubrik, but also the immutable storage of Wasabi, we don’t really have a ransomware concern in terms of backups being destroyed or manipulated.”

Alongside data security features, breakthrough price, performance, and ease of use were also major factors in Reynolds’ decision to go with Wasabi. Reynolds explained how these features enable Williams and Fudge to store data in Wasabi for much longer periods of time than their on-prem solution, “We have a lot of data we are required to keep long term. Wasabi enables us to significantly reduce our overall storage costs by offloading to the cloud. We may only have two weeks of data on-prem, but have a year’s worth of data in Wasabi.” Wasabi’s pricing model excludes fees for egress or API requests, allowing Williams and Fudge to recall data that needs to be quickly accessed with just a click. “If we need something from a month ago, or even three weeks ago, we’re downloading that data from Wasabi,” said Reynolds.

S3 Compatibility for Seamless Ease of Use

Wasabi’s S3 API compatibility with Rubrik enabled Williams and Fudge to quickly set up a backup plan to begin storing their data. “The nature of Rubrik easily leveraging S3-compatible storage means that the built-in archival functions of Rubrik basically lets you plug in credentials, location, create an encryption key and do all of the setups there for any S3-compatible storage right inside of the Rubrik,” Reynolds explained, “When you’re creating the backup plans, you just choose if you want to archive them or not. And then your archive policy dictates when you’re creating those backup plans. You could be up and running in less than five minutes, backing up an entire environment with Rubrik and Wasabi”

Of the many features Williams and Fudge utilize for their archive application, Reynolds shared that an additional benefit of Wasabi is that it simply provides peace of mind. “Wasabi is something we don’t have to think about because number one, it just works. Number two, it checks all the boxes that we need. And number three, you don’t really have to manage it on an ongoing basis. We know that it’s doing what it needs to do, it’s inexpensive, and it gets the job done.”