Iowa Workforce Development is a state agency committed to providing employment services for individual job seekers through our IowaWORKS partnership. Headquartered in Des Moines, Iowa, its staff consists of administrative, labor services, workers’ compensation, labor market information, and unemployment insurance services. The agency also maintains a statewide delivery system of 15 regional, 4 satellite, and 8 expansion offices to provide services to Iowans in communities demonstrating need.

Mike Spurgin, Infrastructure Bureau Chief at the agency, is responsible for the majority of IT operations covering help desk and end-user services. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, our agency has been hit heavily with large volumes of unemployment claims. That means we are experiencing a massive rise in sensitive personal and financial information on our systems since the pandemic started,” said Spurgin. “From March to October, we have seen approximately a 500% increase in the number of unemployment claims we receive a day and hired over 150 temporary workers and onboarded various third party agencies quickly to meet that demand. We implemented Sonar to ensure that we have immediate visibility into all-new user data created during the pandemic and beyond.”

Proactively securing and managing federal tax information with Sonar

Despite the critical need for a data governance solution, Spurgin and team struggled to find a solution that met their agencies’ needs in a cost-effective manner. Given their small team, they prioritized intuitive, efficient products. “During our security review, we identified data classification as one of our gaps. However, when we previously looked at solutions in the market, they were extremely expensive and required bulky monolithic architectures. They were too complex to just get up and running, let alone manage,” explained Spurgin.

As a Rubrik customer, they saw immediate time to value with Sonar. “We turned it on and were reporting on sensitive data the next day. We immediately identified that individuals were storing high amounts of personally identifiable information (PII) on shared user folders. As a result, we created policies and processes with our legal team to ensure secure management moving forward,” said Spurgin.

Iowa Workforce Development is subject to numerous audits from organizations, such as the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), State of Iowa, and Department of Labor. Thus, it is extremely critical that FTI data is stored only in authorized locations. Spurgin said, “Audits put us through the ringer. The top two questions for IRS audits are where our FTI data is located and who has access. Completing the questions can take months. We wanted a proactive solution to immediately classify our FTI data and confirm there is no data leakage outside our data bunker.”

Leveraging Radar for fast and reliable ransomware recovery

In COVID-19 pandemic, state governments and agencies are experiencing high growth in ransomware attacks, making a robust ransomware defense even more critical. Iowa Workforce Development leverages Rubrik’s built-in immutability to ensure their backups cannot be encrypted and Radar to ensure quick, reliable recovery in the event of a ransomware attack.

“We use Radar to fill in the gaps we had in our ransomware defense. We already had strong security measures to ensure ransomware protection. However, if ransomware breaks through our defenses, we now have a one-click recovery to minimize the business impact. With Radar, we now have a playbook for fast ransomware recovery,” said Spurgin.