CASE STUDY

Sky Lakes Medical
Center Avoids PayingRansom, Lowers PACS
TCO

Sky Lakes Medical Center is a not-for-profit teaching hospital serving morethan 80,000 people in south-central Oregon and northern California. When the
INDUSTRY
Healthcare
USE CASES
Backup and Recovery,
Ransomware Recovery, Disaster
Recovery, File and Object
COHESITY SOLUTIONS
DataProtect, SmartFiles
SOLUTION PARTNER
Cisco
CHANNEL PARTNER
CDW

Information Services (IS) staff looked to replace aging data center infrastructure,
it teamed with CDW to choose a joint solution from strategic partners Ciscoand Cohesity for modern, efficient data management. Little did Sky Lakes knowthat its new reliable and simplified backup and disaster recovery (DR) platform
would soon be a cornerstone to its IT security, helping Sky Lakes recoverfrom a ransomware attack while achieving cost-efficient picture archiving andcommunications system (PACS) file service and giving IT staff more time to focus
on other important work.

Challenges
The successful Sky Lakes data center infrastructure refresh to Cisco HyperFlex, a hyperconverged
compute, storage, and networking system, reduced the costs and operational burdens of threedifferent solutions and vendor contracts for the lean IS team. So as the renewal of Sky Lakes™ aging
Commvault backup product neared, IS staff was interested in guidance from both CDW and Cisco as it

Key Benefits• Simplified backup, DR and fileservices• Avoided ransomware payment• Rapid data recovery with nodata loss
• Lower PACS system TCO –Cisco HyperFlex for a cache tierand Cohesity for an archive tier
• Stronger security posture““We are getting more work done than ever, which I attribute to our talented
team, CDW IT orchestration excellence and the very strategic investments
we’ve made in Cisco and Cohesity. There was already 100% consensus among
our engineers that the Cohesity-Cisco solution worked reliably, was easy touse, and we were all more productive with it. Now, there’s also agreementthat Cohesity is the best solution to combat ransomware attacks.”
John Gaede, Director of IS, Sky Lakes Medical Center

CASE STUDY | Sky Lakes Medical Center

evaluated new backup and data management approaches that were“Our organization suffered a critical ransomware attack, effectivelyeasier to use and would drive further efficiencies. The goal was to givecrippling our entire infrastructure. With Cohesity, we’ve been able toengineers greater bandwidth to proactively fulfill all of the requests

recover machines and file shares, verify they’re clean, and bring thecoming in daily.

applications back online. Cohesity has literally saved us hundreds

After Cisco’s recommendation and seeing it perform, Sky Lakes
purchased and quickly set up Cohesity to manage backup andunstructured data while continuing to use Cisco HyperFlex forprimary (latency-sensitive) data on Cisco Unified Computing Systemof hours of work and I’d say it prevented us from having to actually
pay the ransom note. We all still have jobs and the community has
a functional hospital because we have had so much success withCohesity,” says Sam Stewart, Sky Lakes Network Systems Analyst.

(UCS) servers with Cisco Intersight as the single management userAmong the keys to recovery were CDW’s depth of experienceinterface for both. Sky Lakes was among the first to test and deploy

quarterbacking partner teams for successful outcomes and thethe validated Cisco-Cohesity 40G design.

power of the Cohesity-Cisco solution. Cohesity was able to give

Solution
Cohesity software on Cisco UCS for data management was fareasier for Sky Lakes to deploy and use than its prior legacy product.
Cisco Intersight reduces IT operations time and allows oversight ofthe entire infrastructure, including Cisco HyperFlex and Cohesitycertified Cisco UCS nodes. IS no longer has to manually add servers
to the backup queue because Cohesity automatically detects andprotects each virtual machine (VMs) and workload while enabling SkyLakes IT to tag only those it does not want to have backed up. Thiseliminated the need for IS staff to scramble to do a restore data.
Sky Lakes sees tremendous value in the Cohesity multicloud data
platform because it supports multiple data services. In addition tomodern backup, Sky Lakes relies on Cohesity SmartFiles, a softwaredefined solution for file and object services that goes beyond
traditional scale-out NAS within the same cluster. Complementaryto Cisco HyperFlex, SmartFiles lowers Sky Lakes PACS total cost ofownership (TCO) by using Cisco HyperFlex as a cache tier for radiology
images and Cohesity cluster as an archive tier. As a result, Sky Lakes
no longer uses more costly primary storage for PACS archives. IS
expects to use the same configuration for camera systems.
When Sky Lakes was unexpectedly targeted and breached by amassive ransomware attack in October 2020, the healthcare provider
immediately contacted the trusted experts in solving complex
challenges. Together, CDW, Cohesity and Cisco served as a rapidresponse data management team for Sky Lakes as it defended its
data against ransomware. Cohesity immutable backup snapshots,
DataLock and other built-in protections that deter, detect and rapidly
recover data at scale from a ransomware attack empowered IS to say
no to the cybercriminal’s demands.

IS staff access to a granular version of the organization’s Active
Directory database. And Cohesity-Cisco solution’s fast, simple data
restores enabled patients that regularly rely on the Sky Lakes Cancer
Treatment Center to continue their treatments without being sent
elsewhere and inconvenienced. “In this case, it’s not an exaggeration
to say that Cohesity saved lives,” explains Nick Fossen, Manager ofTechnology Solutions at Sky Lakes.
Sky Lakes was also able to instantly restore its file services becauseof Cohesity’s unique Cohesity SmartFiles capability, which supports
SMB, NFS, and S3 Object. Moreover, Sky Lakes was able to instantly
clone the last good backup of its NAS shares and serve those files
directly from the Cohesity cluster—recovering the service to users
without the need to move data.
Cohesity works hours faster than the traditional products that Sky
Lakes used for backups. Before the attack, for example, a PACS
vendor corrupted an SQL database at 6:30 p.m. and contacted anengineer who was able to quickly log into Cohesity remotely, discover
the last fully hydrated backup from 30 minutes prior, and completely
restore the entire database in 2 minutes and 40 seconds. Previously,
this would have taken multiple hours. And in every case withCohesity, IT has had the choice to bring back a server with separate
VMs and SQL backups to different time periods.
Additionally, Cohesity bolsters the Sky Lakes DR strategy. Cohesity
running on Cisco UCS is used as a bi-directional replication target,
allowing the provider to have two, high-capacity sites mirroring eachother for DR.
“We’re trying to deliver quality healthcare with limited budget andresources,” explains Sky Lakes Director of IS, John Gaede. “Cohesity
is reliable and on top of that, we get the ease-of-use value and thespeed at which it performs. All of Cohesity’s innovation helps ourengineers do something immediately and then quickly move tothe next task. Now as my team says, it’s also putting ransomware
extortionists out of business.”

CASE STUDY | Sky Lakes Medical Center

Results
CDW, Cohesity and Cisco are a winning combination for Sky Lakes

With the joint Cisco - Cohesity solution and CDW driving IT strategy
orchestration, Sky Lakes has achieved these benefits:

IS. The comprehensive, integrated Cisco - Cohesity hyperscale• Simplified backup, DR and file services

data management solution empowers all Sky Lakes engineers to• Avoided ransomware payment

perform backups and DR as well as handle file and object services
while strengthening security, including rapid recovery from the• Rapid data recovery with no data loss

ransomware attack. Cohesity eliminated time-consuming tape

• Lower PACS system TCO – Cisco HyperFlex for a cache tier andbackup recovery processes, speeding restores with no data loss. “If
we had not teamed up with CDW to learn about the Cisco-Cohesity
solution, and had still been using our legacy product and had to go
back to tape, it would have taken us weeks, not minutes, to recover.

Cohesity for an archive tier

• Stronger security posture

And because we only save 90 days, we would have lost roughly three

About Sky Lakes Medical Center

months of data. With CDW, Cohesity and Cisco, we lost nothing,”

Sky Lakes Medical Center is a not-for-profit, community-owned,says Fossen.
In addition to defending against ransomware, Cohesity simplifies
everyday tasks and lowers PACS costs. It also reduces staff stressbecause engineers don’t need to spend an hour or two rememberinginternationally accredited acute-care teaching hospital dedicated tothe people it serves. Sky Lakes serves more than 80,000 people in
Klamath and Lake counties in south-central Oregon, and Modoc andSiskiyou counties in northern California.

steps and creating a policy every time a new server is added.
Moreover, high-performance Cohesity indexing and search acrossthe IT environment lets IS staff more quickly find specific information
when they need it most.

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