As we get closer to Halloween, I’m sure most IT professionals have a few things that spook them. One of them being – ransomware and securing their data. In fact, it has been reported that new organizations will fall victim to ransomware every 14 seconds in 2019 and every 11 seconds in 2021. There will be an estimated $6 trillion in damages to business by 2021.
As we move to more IoT devices, studies have been found that it takes just 5 minutes to hack into an IoT device.
I could share more stats, but I’m sure you get the point that security of an organization’s data is a big concern now and will be going forward.
So, what can organizations do to help prepare for an attack and save their data? First, let’s talk about what intelligent data protection is and why you need it.
In today’s digital world, protecting data is becoming more complex every day. More formats, more sources, more access points and longer shelf life for data are just a few of the areas impacting this complexity. Data always needs to be available. Many organizations cannot afford to be off-line.
Intelligent Data Protection is a comprehensive approach to data protection and copy data management that focuses on how the business protects and uses its data (now and in the future).
An organization needs to find the right solution that will integrate the data protection with copy data management technologies with an automated data protection platform.
What may sound like something that you would learn on Sesame Street is the 3-2-1 backup rule. (Imagine the Count counting backups. One backup, two backups, three backups. Ha! Ha! Ha!). The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) highly recommends this practice.
This is a common approach to keeping your data safe in almost any failure scenario. The hope is to maximize application uptime and data availability.
The rule is:
When looking for an intelligent data protection solution, Veeam and HPE’s industry-leading solutions are fully equipped for businesses of all sizes to combat malicious attacks and protect their data. This solution is a fully integrated solution comprised of existing technology. It enables organizations to rapidly recover from ransomware attacks. It is both flexible and affordable. Another benefit is that it can be quickly deployed and into production.
HPE StoreOnce purpose-built appliance and HPE StoreOnce Catalyst benefit organizations by offering space-efficient backup, deduplication, data lifecycle management and information assurance. The most important benefit of this solution is its ability to isolate data from being tampered unintentionally.
StoreOnce Catalyst does not prevent the rest of the enterprise from being compromised by malware. It does protect the mission-critical data stored from being either targeted or affected. Ransomware cannot encrypt what it does not see. The Catalyst store does not use standard operating system command instructions for its operations so malware cannot become active while inside.
The best backup solution is useless if ransomware can access your backup repositories. StoreOnce Catalyst provides protection for backup repositories. The repository is only visible through the Catalyst API.
Several software vendors have integrated StoreOnce Catalyst technology into their data protection applications. One solution to consider is Veeam Backup and Replication . Veeam has several solutions and applications that can assist with your data protection strategy.
The Veeam Mount Server enables the ability to immediately mount backed up virtual machine files for instant VM recovery and unparalleled RTO efficiency when combined with StoreOnce Catalyst. VMs recovered in this way will be mounted Read-Only by default. This further protects the environment should any malicious software remain within the backup data.
Veeam also offers testing environment where you test and remove ransomware item quickly before restoring VMs to production. This is done with Veeam Data Labs and Veeam SureBackup.
Ask Zunesis about other capabilities that Veeam has to help assess, monitor and more for your data backup needs.
Simply backing up data by making copies is not enough anymore. If an operating system can see your data so can ransomware. Ransomware cannot infect what it cannot see.
By practicing the industry best practices and leveraging the right tools, you can prepare for and avoid potential data loss and downtime from ransomware attacks. Contact Zunesis today for an assessment on your storage and backup plans.
Additional Resources:
Protecting Data from Ransomware with HPE StoreOnce Catalyst