Treasure Island doubles down on cyber resilience, can now recover all critical systems in about an hour

Key Benefits

• <23 minutes to restore Active Directory
• ~15 seconds to restore a single VM
• ~1 hour to restore all ~300 servers
• Lower management overhead with simple deployment and hardware changes

Overview

Located on the Las Vegas Strip, Treasure Island is committed to making sure that hotel and casino guests can enjoy services 24/7—even after a cyberattack. With Cohesity immutable backups, cyber resilience is not a crap shoot. The IT team can restore individual virtual machines (VMs) in 15 seconds, the most critical systems in minutes, and all 300 servers in about an hour. That makes the Cohesity solution a win-win for guests and the business.

Challenge

For Treasure Island Hotel & Casino, the guest experience is priority #1. “People save up all year long to have fun in Las Vegas, and we’re committed to showing them a great time,” says Andrew Phan, CIO. “A big part of our job in IT is making sure that our hotel, casino, and food-and-beverage applications are always up, even if we’re hit by a cyberattack.” Cyber resilience is top of mind for casinos, especially after recent attacks made headlines. Some 82% of North American hotels experienced a cyberattack over the summer of 2024.

Treasure Island’s existing data-protection system fell short. Backups could be deleted accidentally or maliciously. And if backups were available, recovery after an attack could take days or weeks, potentially reintroducing malware from compromised snapshots. Phan asked Mike Poblete, Executive Director of IT Business Solutions, to identify and implement a modern cyber resilience platform with built-in data security to safeguard the guest experience and Treasure Island’s reputation.

Solution

After evaluating six data-protection platforms, Treasure Island selected Cohesity. “Only Cohesity met all of our requirements: immutable backups that nobody can alter or delete, rapid recovery, data security, and air-gap replication,” says Phan. “During a proof of concept, Cohesity recovered around 50-100 servers in minutes, compared to weeks with our old system.” Poblete adds, “Cohesity also stood apart for its simple deployment and management. We’re transitioning from VMware to Nutanix, and Cohesity is the only solution we saw that could back up both. The fact that Cohesity and Nutanix are partners put a cherry on top.”

Today, Treasure Island backs up approximately 300 servers and databases to a Cohesity cluster in the data center. For added security, the Cohesity cluster connects to production servers only during backups or restores, and is otherwise isolated. To strengthen cyber resilience, Treasure Island added Cohesity Identity Resilience to accelerate Active Directory recovery. “Restoring Active Directory quickly and cleanly is mandatory for resilience because without it, staff can’t log into any services,” says Poblete. “To test Cohesity Identity Resilience, we created a copy of the entire AD forest, simulated an attack, and initiated a restore from the Cohesity backup. We expected to wait an hour or more, but AD was fully restored to a trusted, malware-free state in under 23 minutes–about 67% faster.”

Result

Critical systems that support the guest experience can bounce back quickly and smoothly, increasing cyber resilience. “I sleep better knowing that if our production servers are attacked, we can recover our hotel, casino, and food and beverage systems to a trusted state in minutes with immutable Cohesity backups,” says Phan. “Recovery took days or weeks with our old system.” To prevent malware from being reintroduced, Cohesity automatically identifies the most recent snapshot that’s free of malware, eliminating time-consuming manual assessments that can delay recovery.

Fast recovery minimizes inconvenience to guests. “If a customer-facing application went down during a holiday, spending days or weeks to restore it would hurt the customer experience–and our reputation,” Poblete says. “With Cohesity we’ve restored VMs in less than 15 seconds and estimate that we could recover all 300 servers in less than an hour.”

The IT team has confidence that the recovered data is malware-free because Cohesity uses AI-powered data security to detect threats hidden in backups before initiating recovery. “Hackers have started deploying teams of AI agents and frontier models to work around the clock to find and exploit vulnerabilities,” Phan says. “By combatting AI with AI, Cohesity threat detection is helping us stay a step ahead by making sure we recover clean data.”

With Cohesity’s simple and intuitive interface, even brand-new IT team members can restore files. “When a record was accidentally deleted, a database administrator who had never used Cohesity restored the record, and it appeared in applications just seconds later,” Poblete recalls. Deployment is also simpler. If a node in the Cohesity cluster needs replacing, an administrator simply racks up a new one, and the Cohesity system automatically sees it: no software reconfiguration needed.

Treasure Island views Cohesity as a partner, not just a vendor. “The Cohesity team is an extension of our IT department,” Poblete says. “They know our infrastructure, the services we deliver, and what data we need to protect. They can see where we have gaps and they suggest solutions.” Phan agrees: “People come to Las Vegas to have fun, and to meet their expectations we need to be resilient. With Cohesity, we can bring back our environment in minutes.”

About Treasure Island Hotel & Casino

Treasure Island on the Las Vegas Strip is a privately owned hotel and casino. With nearly 3,000 guest rooms, Treasure Island is a world-class destination for headline entertainment, including Mystère, the classic Cirque du Soleil performance. Attractions include dining, nightspots, and spa and shopping experiences.