Johnson Electric Quadruples Backup Speed and Blocks Ransomware with Acronis

Johnson Electric is one of the world’s largest providers of motors, solenoids, micro-switches, flexible printed circuits, and micro-electronics. With an annual production capacity of over 1 billion units, Johnson Electric delivers products and services to the most exacting standards of performance, quality, and reliability. Johnson Electric is active in the automotive, building automation, home technologies, and medical device markets and is committed to making its customers as successful as possible by providing product differentiation and supply chain excellence.

Founded in 1959, Johnson Electric has continued to grow and expand its business. With multiple product lines, partner investments, acquisitions, expanding manufacturing facilities, and today’s shifting IT landscape, it has an ever-increasing amount of data to back up. And all of it has to be auditable for compliance purposes. In the U.S., Johnson Electric was trying to perform these tasks with older solutions that are simply not equipped to handle today’s data or threats like malware and ransomware.

“When I started with Johnson in 2011, we were backing up our critical business data on Arcserve from 2006,” said network administrator Joel Stuart. “It worked, but was labor intensive and the completeness of the data was questionable. And there was never any way to get maintenance done.“

“When management asked if our business could survive if a backup failed or we experienced a problem, we realized we had reached a critical point,” said Stuart. Then Johnson’s Ohio office suffered a series of four ransomware attacks. The worst came via email, and Johnson’s antivirus protection failed to detect the threat until after the damage was done. The entire Ohio site, including 200+ users, was affected, as were more than a dozen manufacturing lines. The ordeal lasted 15 hours, with eight hours of downtime for everyone. Over 3 TB of data was affected. Due to the shortcomings of its backups, Stuart had to restore much of the data from local USB hard drives. The total downtime from all four malware attacks was more than 30 hours, but the crisis served as a catalyst for Johnson Electric.

After the attacks, Johnson Electric began looking for a new backup solution that was innovative and robust enough to scale for the future – and one that would provide a strong defense against ransomware.

But the company had other technology goals as well. It was looking for a bare-metal data protection solution that would safeguard its data from hardware failures and natural disasters such as fire or flood. In addition, Johnson Electric wanted to address broader data protection technology goals – security, authenticity, and making data tamper-proof with blockchain technology. Johnson quickly determined that Acronis was the only vendor that could provide comprehensive cyber protection.

Johnson Electric is now using Backup Advanced edition at six sites in the Americas. It has increased its backup from protecting a single physical endpoint to protecting more than 20 physical and virtual endpoints simultaneously at multiple locations (with over 20 TB of data). The deployment cost just one-sixth what other vendors would charge – vendors who can’t provide ransomware protection. In addition, data backup speeds have improved dramatically.
It used to take eight hours to back up primary file servers to an external hard drive with Arcserve. With Acronis and data deduplication, full backups to a deduplication store take only two hours. And backing up the same data to tape takes just five hours.

“The speed with which we can now back up and restore business data was a big selling point for us,” said Stuart. “It gives us confidence because we know our data backups are complete.” Best of all, Johnson has not suffered any new ransomware attacks since switching to Acronis.
“Ransomware was a major point of concern for us,” said Stuart.
“With the innovative features such as Acronis Active Protection against ransomware, we are implementing the strongest cyber protection on
the market today. And the Acronis Notary technology is strategically important to us for the future.”

Acronis sets the standard for cyber protection and hybrid cloud storage through its innovative backup, anti-ransomware, disaster recovery, storage, and enterprise file sync and share solutions. Enhanced by AI-based Active Protection technology, blockchain-based authentication and a unique hybrid-cloud architecture, Acronis protects all data in any environment, including physical, virtual, cloud, mobile workloads and applications.

Founded in Singapore in 2003, today the company is trusted by more than 5 million consumers and 500,000 businesses worldwide, including 79 of the top 100 most valuable brands.