When resilience matters most: How Western Isles Council strengthened recovery with Brightsolid
Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (Western Isles Council) was exploring how to strengthen its business continuity posture when the Council was the victim of a cyber attack. Although Comhairle nan Eilean Siar weren’t yet a customer, Brightsolid stepped in immediately to help.
Following the security incident, core systems and data sets were no longer accessible, and the resulting investigation meant that access could not be restored. This created a temporary challenge for several business-critical services across departments.
While each department had its own business continuity plan in place, and these were activated effectively, there was a need to find a secure, responsive way to protect workloads and maintain operational delivery.
The Solution
Brightsolid worked with Comhairle nan Eilean Siar to implement Brightsolid Cloud combined with Backup-as-a-Service, powered by Druva, an industry-leading provider of data protection solutions.
This provided a flexible and quick-to-deploy service, ensuring immediate coverage and longer-term resilience:
- Initial Microsoft 365 protection was deployed within 24 hours using Brightsolid’s Backup-as-a-Service platform ensuring data in the Microsoft cloud environment was immediately protected.
- Hosted workloads for key systems such as fleet management and the Council’s legacy website were brought online using Brightsolid’s managed cloud, providing continuity and scalability while on-premises infrastructure remained unavailable.
- Secure access controls were applied to all hosted systems using role-based permissions and conditional access, helping the Council maintain a strong security posture during recovery.
- Managed services support included patching, backup management, and operational support for the hosted workloads, helping the internal team focus on wider recovery efforts.
The implementation process was smooth and collaborative, with Brightsolid responding quickly to the Council’s needs and working closely with the internal team to ensure minimal disruption.
With Brightsolid’s support, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar was able to restore services and maintain key operations – beginning the recovery process with greater confidence and less distractions.
The experience underlined the importance of not only having robust protection in place, but also understanding the recovery process from end to end.
“Brightsolid provided a solution in our hour of need. What stood out was how quickly they responded, and how easy it was to get the technical answers we needed. From day one, they just got on with it.”
IT Manager, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar
Outcomes
- Enhanced backup strategy by introducing three backup locations, including an air-gapped, immutable cloud copy for added resilience.
- Improved recovery capabilities, ensuring that backups are tested, documented, and restorable even if core infrastructure is unavailable.
- Updated internal policies and training, helping raise awareness across the organisation and strengthen end-user security practices.
- Redesigned parts of the network architecture, incorporating additional safeguards to reduce risk and improve operational readiness.