 When you think of farming, what immediately comes to mind are the many challenges that farmers face. Planting, fertilizing, harvesting, drought, irrigation, and flooding, pests, parasites, and pesticides. But cyber security, backup, and recovery for farming? Not top of mind. In an ultra-modern, fresh produce operation like Nature Fresh Farms of North America, traditional farming is greatly enhanced by high-tech automation and constant monitoring. 200 acres of state-of-the-art greenhouses grow over 600,000 plants year-round. Super fresh vine-ripened tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and now strawberries. Nature Fresh Farms overarching philosophy, according to founder Peter Quering, is that first you have to love plants. To share that love with your consumers, you have to focus on flavor over net yield. Basically what Nature Fresh comes down to is high-tech automation with traditional farming. And Nature Fresh Farms produce tastes incredible. How do they actually do it? Well, it's the ultimate edge computing case study. High-tech automation meets modern farming. Hundreds of thousands of IoT sensors carefully monitor every plant in the entirety of the greenhouse environment. Ambient temperature, moisture, humidity, and nutrients in and out per plant. When sensors let the growers know that the time is exactly right for harvest, Nature Fresh Farms fully automated warehouses, process, package, and ship 20,000 boxes a day of their delicious produce. Right off the vines, untouched by human hands, from farm to your table in a little more than 24 hours. Because of the heavy reliance on sensors and 22 years' worth of data collected and analyzed for every aspect of the plant's life cycles, every grower who works for Nature Fresh Farms is essentially a data scientist. Ditto for the R&D and warehouse teams. But in order to successfully grow and get this incredible produce so quickly to your table, they need access to that critical data 24-7, 365. And that's where Keith Bradley comes in. Keith runs the entire IT infrastructure team and the IT security operations for Nature Fresh Farms from his home base in Leamington, Ontario. Every aspect of that plant's life we control from the day it arrives to our facility to the day it leaves. And that is basically about a year cycle now, so each plant lasts about one year. So we control how much nutrient, how much light. We try to stop the light at times in the summer when it's too bright. We basically have a patient in our greenhouse from top to bottom, and we take care of that plant from the day it arrives to the day we take it out of here. We do a large number of edge. I like to say we're actually starting doing the edge before there was a concept of the edge. We have hundreds of thousands of sensors looking at our data all the time. And we constantly are innovating what we do and collecting that data to help us grow a better pepper, a better tomato, and coming this July a better strawberry. We have a large selection of edge devices. Everything from collecting weather to collecting ambient temperature, moisture, humidity levels, how much nutrient goes in the plant, how much goes out. We collect everything from multiple sources, everything from a Dell edge to a sensor that we collected from somewhere in Europe. But we collect all of that and bring it all back into our data center for computation. No one expects to be hacked, but in fact, everyone should expect it. Even small to medium businesses, and unfortunately, even farms. Current stats show that a business is hacked every 11 seconds. By 2030, it's estimated that an attack will occur every two seconds. So yes, even farms have to pay special attention to cybersecurity. So we had an attack. It started off as something simple as we had an open port. And they got in and they attacked us. Saturday morning, I get an alert that everything's going down. So my first initial thoughts, because you don't think of a hack, was I lost a core switch or something weird happened. So I packed up, ran into the office on a Saturday morning. Look, everything's lit up, start logging in. Yep, we were hit. Hit hard, it hit every server an hour time. Everything was shut down between all of our facilities. They hit a PC that was one of our IoT PCs and it was basically controlling our packing line. From there, it looks like they sat for about 24 hours and just gained credentials and started to figure out that. They harvest a few things. They kept touching upon different areas. And then all of a sudden, they got another password and another one. And then somehow they ended up figuring out, you know, our main password, our root password. And then all of a sudden, bang, they started doing it. We were lucky they came in quick and left quick because they didn't stick around long. So that was our saving grace that kind of allowed us to restore from our backups, get back going on our feet and get going. But it was that one port that was open, that one PC that we'd just gotten working that allowed them in because it wasn't a PC that we were worried about. We didn't think about things that way. We didn't think of security first. We didn't think it needs to be protected. And we didn't worry about shutting the port down once our activities were done. We had to change that. But Keith and Nature Fresh Farms did have a bit of luck. The hackers didn't get their backups. Keith had multi-factor authentication there. And their Dell Technologies VxRail infrastructure was 100% secure via VMware's carbon black cloud with endpoint and workload protection. Wisely, Nature Fresh Farms refused to pay the Bitcoin ransom. And Keith immediately turned to his Dell Technologies partners to analyze the hack, secure the environment, and begin the arduous process of restoring everything from their secure backups. I've been working with Keith and the Nature Fresh Farms teams for the past eight years as their account executive. Over that time, we've built up a lot of trust, working very closely together. And we've had great opportunities of implementing a lot of new technologies, one of the most recently being our cyber recovery solution. I received a call from Keith on a Saturday morning. And unfortunately, it was a little bit of a shocking call. He let us know about the breach. And immediately what I told him is we have an incident recovery team that would be able to help the entire Nature Fresh Farms team, both from trying to sort out where the problem arise, remediating that problem, and then looking at helping to support them on the recovery efforts. Also, one of the great things about our incident recovery team is that we have a number of security specialists that can help us identify where the gaps are within their security posture so that we can make adjustments as we move forward once we alleviate the difficulties of the breach. We kind of really turned our focus not to what happened, and more, okay, we just have to get a path moving forward. A path that gets us back to our feet, gets us back to normal, and then the long term gets us back to a safe place. Working very closely and collaboratively with the Nature Fresh Farms team, our group was able to get all of their mission critical servers and applications up and running within a couple of days. So the incident happened on a Saturday, and we had most of the mission critical applications up and running by Monday. Within a couple of extra business days, we had all operations up and restored, which was critical for their business. Once we resolved the immediate problem, we identified a number of different areas where we can improve the security posture of the farm. One of the main areas was dealing with their backup and recovery solution and building out also a cyber resiliency plan. We not only wanted to look at resilience, but we wanted to look at a three-prong approach. We wanted to protect our outside. We wanted to make sure our backups were safe, but we also wanted to make sure that we could, when and if it ever does happen again, recover much quicker than we do. We learned that we were down for a good chunk of time. How do we get better at recovering very quickly and cleanly? So that's where we started that journey looking at it. There are a number of solutions that we propose to Nature Fresh Farms, one being two-factor authentication, single sign-on, and next-gen AV. But one of the most important pieces was to ensure that we advanced their backup and recovery solutions that they had in place. Mainly, we proposed power-protected data domains as a backup target that was purpose-built and secure, along with power-protected data manager and our cyber recovery vault. So we hardened the perimeter. We made sure to update all of our firewalls. We added log monitoring. We got outside people to look at our logs, things like that. Then we looked at our backup recovery process, and our current backup system didn't have the speed we needed. It didn't have the ability to convert a backup into there. So then we switched our backup profile. We switched how it does. We switched our power-protected data manager, which allows us to recover now instead of hours and hours within minutes now we can do it. And then we started also educating our end-users. I like to say I really took a heart to that, because when we did it, I said I'm not only educating them to protect us, but we're protecting our family of employees. How do we teach them to be safe themselves? And that was the fun part of that. I'd like to say one of the few fun things that have this to happen. But then the next thing we started to do is we now looked at this. Now we have a new backup system. It works great, but we want to make sure there's nothing there. So the next thing we did is we said we're now looking at adding a cyber vault to it. We want a system, a platform that we could build and expand our cyber security presence. So now we can create an automated air gap system that allowed us to keep our data safe. And then we want to go to the next step with that, actually analyze that data so that we know 100% that there is nothing malicious in those backups that have made it through our cyber vault. We identified a number of different areas where we can improve the security posture of the farm. One of the main areas was dealing with their backup and recovery solution and building out also a cyber resiliency plan. One of the main things there was to ensure that we provided immutability, isolation and intelligence around the solution. And that's exactly what he received when we implemented the Dell PowerProtect data manager along with our cyber vault solution. Because we do so much IoT, we have so many databases as we started to restore quicker now. With our new system, we were able to restore. So when one of our databases gets mocked up, we just started to restore. So what I liked about it was it taught my team how to use this on a daily basis because how many companies and we were no different. We actually tested, tried, tested and did a restore from nothing, especially in our space. We recommended Nature Fresh Farms to keep their production and air gap backups isolated from each other. That separation was key so that they would be able to ensure that the security on their air gap backup was going to give them the best types of restores in a secure restore. It also helped them to be able to do testing on their restores to make sure that it was efficient and quick and that they'd be able to get the recovery times that they were hoping for. The primary backup unit and the cyber vault, they will act independent of each other. So they know what's going on. They know that I'm here to hold the data and I'm going to put it to the vault. But they work independently from each other. Being the VP of IT and security, it's difficult to have your eyes and ears on everything. Delegating some of that workload and spreading it out to the team and having more people managing and monitoring the environment was a good thing and I believe that's the steps that their team has taken. I think they're in a better place for it now. It was a siloed knowledge, I said, for my team. I was the one that did it. I was the one that did this, that. And now I want to get it so that they're the ones doing it. Because when I siloed that information, that was my fear next. What happens if I was somewhere like Dell World where somewhere doing all these things? Somewhere at another event, how do I help them do this? How do we make a way so we all know it? Keith was looking for a single source of truth and that's exactly what he got with our solution, the Dell PowerProtect Data Manager. He was able to give him a single pane of glass that would help him monitor and back up his SQL server environments, VxRail, PowerScale and his Office 365 environment. With the previous solution that he had, which was a non-Dell solution, he wasn't able to get that. And his backups were taking up to six hours and sometimes he wouldn't be able to back up over a single night. Utilizing transparent snapshots, he's able to now do backups of single workloads within two to three seconds. So a tremendous amount of performance increased by utilizing our solution. Nature Fresh Farms had already been running a highly successful edge computing, IoT sensor, data-driven farming operation for years. Supporting the data scientists who are their growers, their R&D teams and logistics staff. It's a real shame they suffered a debilitating ransomware attack, but they were fortunate to be able to recover their data and learn from it. Nature Fresh Farms has since hardened their defenses, educated their people to improve security and implemented better, faster and more secure cyber-resilience infrastructure with the help of their partners at Dell Technologies. They're in a great position to limit the severity of any future attack. They have an intelligent system that's going to be able to help them recover quickly and limit the impact to the business. It's allowed us to take a larger number of backups daily. It's allowed us to control our data at a more finite level and know exactly what's happening. And I want to know that I can recover and continue to recover each day.