Municipality of Gennep

Municipality of Gennep relies on air-gap with Silent Bricks:

‘The air-gap is immediately clear. That gives certainty’

In response to a hack at the Hof van Twente municipality last year, the Association of Netherlands Municipalities (VNG) recommended secure backups with air-gap. The municipality of Gennep took up the challenge and inquired with supplier Avensus about the possibilities. Roel Janssen and Gerrie Gossens of Gennep municipality and Daan Lieshout of Avensus tell their story.

Gerrie Gossens is a system administrator at the municipality of Gennep. After the events at Hof van Twente, where hackers had control over the entire system, he and colleague Roel Janssen (Technical Information Advisor) realized that they had to take measures. “Suppose you’ve put a lot of money and energy into stopping hackers, things can still go wrong. Often it’s because of human error. Still, we wanted a secure backup that would be inaccessible to hackers, so that in the event of a hack or other calamity, we wouldn’t be completely helpless.” That thought was further fueled by the advice of the UNG.

Different solutions

Following the advice of the VNG, the Gennep municipality turned to Avensus, the regular IT partner for the municipality, for advice. Daan Lieshout commented, “There are several solutions to this problem. You can write your data away externally to a cloud service or a secure Linux server, but all these solutions are still connected by a thread. Although writing away to a so-called hardened Linux server is almost impossible to hack, the municipality of Gennep was right not to settle for “almost. They want to make sure their data is secure.”

View options

So: looking for a storage system with an air-gap, a physical separation between network and storage so that the backup cannot be accessed by hackers through the system. Several possibilities passed in review. “We looked at storage on tape, but that turned out to be too laborious and too slow, aside from some technical obstacles. Eventually we ended up with Silent Bricks. Everyone at Gennep Municipality can see that the moment you remove a Silent Brick from the system, you literally create an air-gap. Silent Bricks additionally require few actions, they are simple to use. It’s not higher math.” Also important was the link with Veeam.

Gerrie Gossens: “The basis we work with is Veeam Backup, which makes a backup in the evening at the work location. Then a copy is written to the fallback location. After those two jobs comes a third job to feed a replica system with this data based on the backups. So now we’ve expanded that with an air-gapped backup system, interfaced with Veeam.”

Clutch

There are several ways you can use the Silent Bricks and write data away via Veeam software. Daan Lieshout: “We tested these options, looking for the most optimal way with the least amount of actions. We looked for the easiest way from Veeam, and all in all we now manage to load two Silent Bricks into the system once every two days, after which the backup is made after a few clicks. And the goal: an air-gapped backup, is easily achieved. Remember that this backup is your last life preserver. Even in the event of a disaster, you want to be up-and-running again as quickly as possible after a restore with few resources and actions. You can do that this way. It’s almost plug-and-play.”

Security

Gennep used several considerations in choosing this system. Roel Janssen: “This option was the most comprehensive and safest. The air-gap is immediately clear and that gave us security. In the event of a calamity, we can restore the system relatively quickly. Few operations and equipment are needed for that. After implementation there were a few moments of fine-tuning and adjustment, but that all went smoothly and the system is running to our complete satisfaction.” “And that’s fine,” Gerrie Gossens observes. “The municipality had to give its approval after all, and the executives then obviously want to see results. You hope you never have to use such a backup, but you have to have it anyway.”

Gennep Municipality’s IT staff changes the Silent Bricks once every two days, and making the backup is only a few minutes of work. Gennep has a total of five Silent Bricks. Each Silent Brick is 24TB, but because of the redundancy contained in a Silent Brick, a number of disks may fail without consequence. Therefore, each Silent Brick is effectively 16TB. Each Silent Brick can therefore easily accommodate Gennep’s entire environment. The five Silent Bricks are used to write away the backups from Monday to Friday, thus rotating each week. If you want to keep extra weekly or monthly backups, you can add extra Silent Bricks. Roel: “It’s nice that it’s very scalable. So if you get more data, you just add another Silent Brick.”