Farys is one of six companies in Belgium responsible for drinking water distribution, transport, and treatment. They also operate a large number of sports facilities, including swimming pools and sports halls.

Farys provides an essential service of great importance to society. Without drinking water, electricity, or hospitals, we'd be in serious trouble. The government therefore decided that such providers must implement extra protection against potential cyberattacks. A solid Disaster Recovery Plan was called for.

A Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) contains a clear description of what needs to happen in the event of an emergency at Farys, such as a fire or flood. Thanks to the DRP, they have a fallback option in that case, so no one is left without drinking water.

Xylos analyzed Farys's situation and concluded that up to 10 days of data could potentially be lost in the event of a disaster.

For Jeroen Van Praet, ICT Coordinator at Farys, that was unacceptable: “We have around a thousand employees. If you convert that into hours, you end up with enormous costs. So we had to reduce those 10 days to a few hours, or even seconds.”

The Xylos experts proposed a disk-based solution, eliminating the manual work of moving tapes in and out of the library. We also worked with traditional X86 rack servers from HPE, running on a software solution from Cohesity, which the customer can easily manage through a web interface.

“As soon as a backup starts, it's replicated to a second Cohesity node,” says Jeroen. “So instead of 10 days of data loss, we now lose only a few seconds from the moment the backup is taken. A huge leap forward.”

An additional benefit: maintaining the rack servers is much simpler. After all, there are fewer components involved that need to be managed or that could go wrong.

For Jeroen Van Praet, the project is a success: “We already have a great deal of confidence that everything runs automatically. And if there are any issues, we get the necessary alerts about them.”

Tom Willems, Chief Information Security Officer at Farys, confirms: “We can do more in parallel: take more backups and run restores if a problem should occur. We're definitely better off than before.”