AI Engineers is a multi-disciplined engineering firm specializing in bridge design, load rating, and commercial construction. Derrick Woolford, Director of IT, oversees all aspects of cybersecurity, disaster recovery, and compliance.
Woolford experienced a common and critical challenge: ransomware recovery was time-consuming and unpredictable. In a previous role, it took an entire week to locate a clean backup, only to find it was a month old.
"We once spent a week trying to restore backups after a ransomware attack. Each backup was infected, leading to further downtime and lost data. We didn't know which backups were safe. It was pure guesswork."
Derrick Woolford, Director of IT, AI Engineers
Woolford discovered Elastio at a security conference. The Hunt Engine performs Deep File Inspection on backup data, detecting hidden threats and verifying integrity at the file level.
During the proof of value, the Hunt Engine identified malware that had been missed by four major antivirus solutions.
Elastio inspects Veeam backups out-of-band, with no agents on production systems and no performance impact.
"With the Elastio Platform, I can see when backups became infected. I know which backup to restore, saving days of trial and error. It's a huge time saver."
Derrick Woolford, Director of IT, AI Engineers
AI Engineers now operates with continuous backup integrity verification. Recovery times dropped from days or weeks of manual effort to minutes.