Centum Services deploys Rubrik recovery solutions to Royal Flying Doctors Service Queensland

Centum Services has deployed Rubrik’s recovery solutions to protect the Royal Flying Doctors Service Queensland against ransomware attacks.

The Brisbane-based professional services provider deployed Rubrik’s rapid RTO (Recovery Time Objectives) and RPO (Recovery Point Objectives) solutions and supported the airline and healthcare agency's Microsoft Azure environment.

The Royal Flying Doctors Service Queensland chief technology officer Adam Carey said the charity was prompted to bolster its security by several attacks. 

“Even against our own organisation we’ve seen cleverly crafted, targeted phishing attacks, especially to our executive team. It shows nothing is off limits, not even essential health services like ours.”

Carey said the scale of the charity’s operations meant it was responsible for an enormous number of patients’ data and needed to protect the “crown jewels”. 

Each year the organisation delivers more than 98,000 episodes of care which includes transporting 11,700 patients to and from metropolitan hospitals, running more than 5,300 health clinics across regional, rural, and remote Queensland, and providing health advice to more than 16,000 telehealth patients.

Carey said, “Patient care is our main reason for existing, and the motivation for everything we do. For us, care extends beyond the physical – it’s also about ensuring patient privacy is always protected and Rubrik helps us protect it.”

Carey added that, in addition to the privacy risks posed by ransomware, a bad actor holding critical data hostage would be an operational nightmare to the organisation, which manages a fleet of 20 aeromedical aircraft to reach remote areas.

“We need to protect our data to remain operational at all times. If we were to lose access to some of our key data and systems, pilots couldn’t log their flight plans for the day, so they’d literally be grounded,” he said. 

Carey said that the recovery solutions Centum Services implemented meant that even in a worst-case scenario the emergency agency could be back-up-and-running within hours.

“The fact we have critical data stored in Rubrik, off-premises, completely air-gapped from our environment, means we can restore to a different tenancy or a completely different server straight away, without having to stand up any physical infrastructure – our bases are covered.”

“We’re protecting our entire Outlook, Exchange, Teams, and Sharepoint environments along with the core servers that hold our critical data – both corporate drives and medical databases,” he said. “We implemented Rubrik the week before Christmas and it literally took 90 minutes to set up.”

Rubrik Australia and New Zealand managing director Scott Magill said “the biggest risk organisations face today is the inability to operate – losing access to data means losing access to applications, and therefore losing the ability to function.”