Overview
PLUS is the vital backbone of Malaysia’s transportation infrastructure, connecting the northern border with Thailand to the southern border with Singapore. It links all major airports, seaports, and towns across Peninsular Malaysia, serving over 32 million citizens. As the largest expressway concessionaire, PLUS facilitates the safe and efficient movement of people, goods, and essential services, with traffic volumes reaching 1.7 million vehicles daily and swelling by over 30% during holidays. The need for robust cybersecurity measures became starkly apparent when a peer organization fell victim to a ransomware attack, leading to significant operational disruptions and revenue loss. This incident highlighted the vulnerabilities in the transportation sector and prompted PLUS to reevaluate its cybersecurity posture.
Millions of citizens and businesses across the country depend on us to keep traffic moving. Rubrik is pivotal in maintaining our business resiliency.
Challenges
-
Risk of impact to 1.7 million daily customers and revenue loss in the event of a cyber attack
-
No cloud-native protection against ransomware
-
30-day limit to Microsoft 365 backups
Results
-
16% TCO savings in comparison to native backups
-
Simplicity and faster performance in comparison to native backups
-
Immutability and logically air-gapped backups
Challenges
A wake-up call from ransomware
When the ransomware attack crippled a peer expressway operator, causing a standstill that affected commuters and businesses, PLUS recognized the urgent need to bolster its defenses against cyber threats. The attack’s consequences—ranging from halted traffic to revenue loss and compromised emergency services—underscored the critical nature of uninterrupted operations for PLUS and its customers.
After a thorough evaluation of data security solutions, Rubrik was selected for its immutability, ease of use, and ability to seamlessly unify protection across hybrid cloud environments. Combined with 16% total cost of ownership (TCO) savings and advanced threat detection and response capabilities, Rubrik provided PLUS with the complete cyber resilience it sought after.
“Millions of citizens and businesses across Malaysia and beyond depend on us to keep traffic moving. Rubrik’s robust data security measures and quick recovery options are pivotal in maintaining our business resiliency,” said Chief Technology Officer, Kang Yew Jin.
Millions of citizens and businesses across Malaysia and beyond depend on us to keep traffic moving. Rubrik’s robust data security measures and quick recovery options are pivotal in maintaining our business resiliency
Solutions
Future proofing through extended protection
PLUS has an extensive network infrastructure for collecting payments at cashless toll plazas and rest areas along its expressways. This infrastructure also supports traffic control, toll gates, and emergency response for all of Malaysia. “The PLUS mobile app allows our customers to plan their journey, check traffic, redeem loyalty offers for our 3 million loyal PLUSMiles rewards program members, and so much more,” says Vincent Leo, Head of Digital Initiative Studio. “Our services are an integral part of Malaysians’ daily lives—that is why it is imperative our infrastructure be resilient to serve our citizens day in and day out.”
A cloud-first organization and one of Asia’s largest Microsoft Azure users, PLUS hosts 90% of its workloads on Azure and Microsoft 365. The company initially planned to rely on Azure backups; however, the ransomware attack on its peer concessionaire highlighted the need for more comprehensive data protection for its cloud environment.
With Rubrik cloud-native protection, PLUS has a unified single pane of glass for both on-prem and cloud data, immutable and air-gapped backups, as well as cost efficiencies, being able to take advantage of low-cost long-term storage with intelligent tiering and deduplicated data archival.
Rubrik also enables PLUS to safeguard years of critical M365 data, beyond the default 30-day period limited by M365 backups, ensuring business continuity even in the case of hardware failures. Leo highlights, “Rubrik gives us the flexibility to pinpoint and recover individual emails or SharePoint and OneDrive files for our customers. The precision search and recovery features have improved the customer experience by streamlining the restoration of lost emails and files.”
Our services are an integral part of Malaysians’ daily lives—that is why it is imperative our infrastructure be resilient to serve our citizens day in and day out
The Results
A pledge to continuous improvement
Looking ahead, PLUS is committed to further enhancing its cybersecurity measures, ensuring that it remains ahead of emerging threats and continues to serve as a reliable pillar of Malaysia’s transportation infrastructure. “As we continue to grow, we wanted a partner that could grow with us,” adds Kang. “With Rubrik protecting our critical IT infrastructure, we are confident we can deliver on the promise to get people where they need to go.”
Ready to get started?
Get a personalized demo of the Rubrik Zero Trust Data Security platform.