ASL Airlines France Combats Ransomware and Unifies Global Management with Rubrik Polaris

Overview

ASL Airlines France (ASL) is a cargo and passenger airline based in Tremblay-en-France at Bâtiment Le Séquoia. Their main base is Charles de Gaulle airport, Europe’s second busiest air traffic hub. A majority of ASL’s fleet operates on the behalf of delivery services throughout the night, including Amazon, FedEx, DHL, UPS, and La Poste. Their unique fleet of Boeing 737-300 Quick Change aircrafts allows them to switch from a cargo configuration to a passenger configuration within one hour, allowing ASL to charter several passenger flights for partnering airlines during the day. In 2017 alone, ASL carried 712,000 passengers and 38,600 tons of cargo.

With such a diverse array of responsibilities, ASL’s IT department needs to provide dependable, always-on infrastructure. Fabrice De Biasio, CIO, manages an IT team that supports 150 aircrafts and 3,000 employees, including a 2,200-person flight crew. "If we’re unable to pull reports for our passenger flights from our Oracle database, we can incur a sizable fine. The same goes for cargo flights. Rubrik is the reason we’re confident our data is always going to be available to meet these requirements," said De Biasio

“It’s important that we remain early adopters in the IT landscape. The more knowledgeable we are of trends and new technologies, the more nimble we can be as the market evolves.”

Solutions

Global visibility and control with Edge and GPS

With remote sites in Belgium and Ireland, it was imperative that ASL was able to maintain full visibility into their data. “We’re proud to be Rubrik’s first GPS customer delivered on Rubrik’s Polaris SaaS platform,” said De Biasio. “GPS allows us to conduct reports and audits from a centralized interface which is important as we align our backup policies worldwide. Additionally, the SaaS platform gives us flexibility to accommodate our ever-changing business needs in the future.”

ASL also uses Edge, Rubrik’s software appliance, for local backup and replication to protect their remote and branch offices. “One of our key drivers in choosing Rubrik was Edge,” said De Biasio. “With our previous solution, we had to manually schedule several jobs to complete just one task. Edge has allowed us to replicate between central and remote sites while standardizing our backup processes, keeping all of our activities up and running with ultimate management simplicity.”

Polaris delivers multi-level ransomware defense with Radar ASL

ASL has deployed Radar to significantly minimize downtime, potential cost of recovery, and reputational damage following Ransomware attacks. On top of that, ASL’s previous solution was not built for a strong defense on the rapidly growing threat of Ransomware. “The cargo airline industry is a common target for Ransomware, and we experience a minimum of one attack per month,” said De Biasio. “In the past, we managed to recover by using a multitude of scripts to identify and erase infected files manually. This was an incredibly painful, time-consuming experience that killed our team’s productivity for days.”

Now, with Radar’s machine learning-powered anomaly detection and accelerated recovery, De Biasio and team save up to 40+ hours of manually monitoring applications. As a result, they are confident in their ability to quickly restore to the pre-infected state in the event of a threat. “Our team can spend more time on digital transformation activities that deliver value back to the business,” said De Biasio.

ASL was also approved for cyber insurance, a notoriously difficult achievement given the high risk associated with cargo companies. “It’s very hard for cargo airlines to get cyber insurance. If we did not have Radar, we would not have been approved for a cyber insurance contract,” said De Biasio.