Westland Real Estate Group User Story: Spanning Backup for Google Workspace

Spanning Backup is this Real Estate Group’s Safety Net Against Ransomware

Easy Backup. Reliable Recovery.

50-year old Real Estate Company, thriving in Southern California

Westland Real Estate Group started over 50 years ago to cater to Southern California’s demanding real estate market. It develops, redevelops and manages residential real estate — 15,000 apartments spread over 50 buildings — and commercial spaces. Westland believes that properties, like people, have hidden strengths and potentials that are often overlooked.

Knows that Spanning’s data protection is a must to withstand cybercrime

Small and mid-sized businesses are lucrative targets for malware; over 58% of malware attacks target small and mid-sized businesses. Westland Real Estate Group learned this the hard way when they were attacked by ransomware a few years ago. It’s easy to think backup isn’t needed for Google Workspace, owing to Google’s robust security. While Google Workspace is extremely secure, it cannot protect you from errors at your end — including malware, and data loss due to inadvertent or malicious error.

“Just like it happens in many other companies, someone clicked on a malicious link in an email. Normally you would think it would not affect your cloud files, but our legal team’s repository was syncing up to Google Drive. The Drive sync tool did its job and right away started uploading the malware-encrypted files,” says Jesse Nowlin, IT director, at Westland Real Estate Group

It took a massive effort to restore back thousands of last-known-good, uncorrupted files. “Yes, I can revert individually to the earlier versions, but this was thousands of files! It was then I realized how vulnerable our cloud file architecture really is; maybe not from attack if Google is doing their job correctly, but from human error. Backup is even more important for us, as most of our employees work remotely,” Nowlin says. 

Get Reliable Backup and Quick Recovery with Spanning Backup

Westland Real Estate Group chose Spanning Backup for Google Workspace, after being disappointed in the performance of  a competitor’s product.

“While I was relaxing on vacation, I started to get calls and emails that suddenly people have mysteriously lost access to a large number of their files,” Nowlin explains.  “Turns out, one folder was moved which contained  280,000 folders that were also moved. I thought, no problem — I have a backup. I initialized the backup and went back to my vacation. Imagine my horror when I realized the restore failed, because the backup system we were using had not done a complete backup in eight months! Any files it had backed up were restoring at a rate of a few hundred a day. I needed those files immediately and not in weeks. I contacted Spanning the next week, tested and chose Spanning, and haven’t looked back.”

Spanning’s dependable solution also comes with numerous features that make recovery easy and quick, thereby reducing the stress and worry of data loss. Westland’s favorite Spanning features? Unlimited backup, Team Drive backups, and cross-user restore.  

Spanning’s commitment to being easy from start to finish goes beyond backup and restore to post-sales support and licensing. “The licensing is able to add new users automatically, and I can see them in the system in a matter of days. The IT Department is sleeping better at night thanks to offsite backups that work,” Nowlin says.

Don’t let Malware Damage your Organization

Learn More About Spanning Backup for Google Workspace