Semperis Customer Spotlight: Paul Ladd, VP of Information Systems & Technology, AMOCO Federal Credit Union
Paul discusses the challenges they faced with protecting and backing up their Active Directory during internal risk assessments, and how Semperis was able to quickly back up and restore their system. They emphasize the importance of disaster recovery and their ability to quickly restore the system in the event of a problem. The speaker also explains how they expanded their use of Semperis to include their DSP products to protect their Active Directory from a security standpoint, and how they were able to harden their infrastructure and ensure its security.
Speaker: Paul Ladd, VP of Information Systems & Technology, AMOCO Federal Credit Union Some of the business challenges we face and the reasons we bought Semperis were that during our internal risk assessments, we realized that we weren’t protecting the Active Directory as well as we should have. We weren’t backing up as well as we should have. And Semperis was able to back it up and restore it insanely quickly. During our testing, we’re able to back up and restore our Active Directory within 20 minutes to a completely different data center with minimal downtime. During a normal backup scenario that could take, you know, 24, 36 hours, depending on how bad it is. It really fills that disaster recovery hole that we had, Active Directory is the heart of your infrastructure and your servers. It’s very important to back up and restore as quickly as possible. Being near the Gulf Coast, we have to be very flexible and very agile with our disaster recovery, and ADFR has allowed us to do that in preparation for those hurricanes that are unfortunately going to hit us at some point or another. Thankfully, we haven’t had to use it yet and hopefully we’ll never have to use it. But there’s peace of mind there that if we do need it and we do have an Active Directory problem, we’ll be able to restore very quickly whether it’s just our DNS, where there’s just one piece of Active Directory, or the whole thing. We purchased Semperis ADFR. And since then we’ve expanded to their DSP product, which helps us protect Active Directory from a security standpoint, monitors vulnerabilities and audit logs. We’re able to roll back changes and watch for any admin activity that’s anomalous. We were able to harden our Active Directory infrastructure like it’s never been before. We’re able to hit all those little checkboxes and make sure that it’s absolutely secure.
