Headquartered in Temple Terrace, Florida, Chapters Health System is a principal provider of care for persons affected by advanced and life-limiting illnesses. As one of the country’s first post-acute care systems, Chapters Health is a progressive leader in the delivery of hospice, palliative care, and home health services. Each year, Chapters Health delivers hundreds of thousands of healthcare services across eight counties in West Central Florida through its inpatient and outpatient locations. Chris Williams, Director of IT Operations at Chapters Health, and Mike Parkin, Director of IT Security, discuss how Rubrik protects against the threat of Ransomware and empowers their multi-hypervisor strategy.

What challenges were you experiencing with data protection?
CW: We were concerned with the growing threat of Ransomware, particularly given the prevalence of attacks targeting hospitals and healthcare systems. The previous solution also failed to provide adequate visibility, which resulted in us needing to physically call the vendor to check the status of a backup. Conducting maintenance was a pain, too. Every new software update would result in issues with our agents or logs not being truncated.

MP: We wanted to implement Nutanix AHV, which, with our previous vendor, would have forced us to purchase additional hardware and licenses. Also, With our previous vendor, we constantly worried about our backups. Our backups frequently failed and restores often took more than eight hours to complete.

Why did you choose Rubrik?
CW: When we were first introduced to Rubrik as a backup and recovery solution, we were looking for a solution to combat Ransomware. We were investigating ransomware protection separately from backup and recovery, but Rubrik addresses both issues in a single solution. With Rubrik, we know that our data is protected and accessible 24/7 and that we can recover from Ransomware instantly without losing any data.

MP: Rubrik is hypervisor-agnostic and enables us to utilize different clouds or hypervisors without incurring additional cost for backups. Rubrik supports Nutanix, VMware, and Microsoft, allowing us to use whichever is most cost-effective or delivers the best performance. This keeps us from being beholden to one vendor, which we appreciate.

What features help drive business outcomes?
CW: Rubrik integrates directly into VMware vSphere and Nutanix AHV, which spares us a lot of agent management overhead. The platform offers incredible ease-of-use and dramatically cuts down our backup management time. SLA-based scheduling lets us automate our backups to reduce our RPO, and with Live Mount and instant restore, our RTO is near zero. Additionally, we can’t overstate the value of Rubrik’s search functionality. Our users often forget where they saved a file or what they named it, so being able to quickly search for a file or VM is particularly helpful.

What results have you seen with Rubrik?

  • Protection from Ransomware: Ransomware is a huge issue for the healthcare industry and we know that we’re a likely target. If we’re attacked, we know that Rubrik will let us recover instantly to a snapshot without losing any of our data. – C.W.
  • Simple Multi-hypervisor management: Rubrik gives us a single pane of glass to manage data across our entire environment instead of having separate systems for each hypervisor. It’s incredibly easy to use. – M.P.
  • TCO reduction: Rubrik would pay for itself strictly on how much we were able to cut down our hardware footprint. Combine that with the fact that we don’t need to pay for more licenses to use Nutanix AHV, and it’s significant. – C.W.
  • Near-zero RTOs and improved RPOs: Before Rubrik, backups regularly failed and restores took hours to complete. With Rubrik, our backups are consistent, restores take less than a minute, and we can use search to easily locate the files we need. – M.P.

How do you plan on using Rubrik in the future?
CW: We’re planning to archive to the cloud, and we know that Rubrik sets up well to execute on that regardless of the cloud platform we use. Rubrik is incredibly flexible and is constantly rolling out new integrations and features. Each release gives us something new that we can use to be more efficient or execute more effectively.

Want to learn more? Read the case study.