When a cyberattack happens, such as a ransomware or malware attack, the CEO and the entire senior leadership team of an enterprise anywhere in the world want to know how fast the business can recover. It is a critical issue for all enterprises.
In the U.S. and Europe, if an organization has been hit by a cyberattack, it is required to file legal documentation, which means companies have to reveal the impact of the cyberattack. Recently, in the U.S., a large enterprise noted in their public filing that a cyberattack cost them $2.9 billion ─ a huge and unplanned expense.
This reality has put data protection in a bigger spotlight. Because companies continue to pay the ransom for data that has been taken “hostage” or pay for the damages caused by a largescale cyberattack, it’s clear that the conventional approach to data protection is not effective at combating cyber threats. They need to be augmented by something else that complements it with newer, more effective capabilities.
This is where next-generation data protection comes in.
What is Next-Generation Data Protection?
Next-generation data protection was built with today’s most sophisticated and dangerous cyberattacks as a primary issue to fix. It expands the purview of what is protected and how it is protected within an enterprise data infrastructure. It adds preemptive and predictive capabilities that help mitigate the effects of massive cyberattacks.
Moreover, next-generation data protection is the last line of defense against the most vicious, unscrupulous cyber criminals who want nothing more than to take down and harm a large company, either for monetary gain or a notch on their belt. It’s truly important to understand what next-generation data protection is.
If you are only going to remember one thing from this article, remember the point in this paragraph: Next-generation data protection includes the traditional aspects of data protection, such as being able to handle backup repositories and being able to snapshot and replicate data. But the next generation of data protection includes cyber storage resilience and ultra-rapid cyber recovery. That’s it!
To expand on it, next-gen data protection provides a cyber-focused, recovery-first methodology. Immutability of the data is key. It calls for true immutability of data. You have to have immutable copies of data, so you can analyze it without the possibility of the data being compromised after a cyberattack.
This goes far beyond the traditional outlook, which basically only saw immutability as a compliance issue or would even have a “backdoor” to circumvent the immutability and be able to unlock the data – a measure that leaves open the possibility of compromise and misuse. However, with next-gen data protection, preserving true immutability is key to recovery. The data cannot be altered or changed in any way. There is no “backdoor.”
“Recovery-first” means the endpoint has to be first. How can you leverage immutable snapshots to do your recovery as quickly as possible? Leverage immutable snaps and make sure that the data is proactively verified and validated. So, you don’t have to do it after the fact.
To make data protection highly effective today for the datasets that you seem most critical, it has to be highly integrated and orchestrated. You don’t want a manual process making a weak spot for your organization. To resolve this issue, one of the breakthrough capabilities of next-generation data protection is automated cyber protection.
Automated cyber protection seamlessly integrates cyber storage resilience into a cyber security operation center (SOC) and data center-wide cyber security applications, such as SIEM and SOAR cyber applications. At the first signal of a cyberattack, an immutable snapshot of your data is taken automatically. There is no manual process of the security team calling up the storage admin to say that there is a potential cyberattack underway. It’s now all automated, merging data center cybersecurity with cyber resilient storage.
Indeed, automated cyber protection is the thing that paves the way to rapid cyber recovery because it kicks off the process of obtaining a known clean copy of data that can be validated as 100% free of corruption.
Why Should Enterprise Tech Buyers Care?
Now that you know what next-generation data protection is vs traditional / modern data protection schemes, the next question is: why should you care?
The answer revolves around your gaining leverage over cyber attackers by taking a cyber focused, recovery-first approach, which will enable you to get your data back in as quickly as the snap of your fingers. Literally! We have publicly recovered >2 PB of data in ONLY four seconds. Now that is a Recovery Time Objective (RTO)!
Below are five points that give you reasons to care:
[1] Achieving the best possible outcome if you get attacked by malware or ransomware.
- A cyber-focused, recovery-first methodology is a proven approach to making the best of a bad situation. You know your organization will get hit with an attack at some point, if not already. You can recover, if you take an outcome-centric viewpoint that guides your next move.
[2] Backups are target attack points.
- If cybercriminals compromise your backup system, they will disable them before they corrupt your data on primary storage. This is the reason you have to be proactive and do it on an ongoing basis. Conventional backup systems are optimized for backup, not for restore. The size and amount of data that needs to be recovered is not a great situation for traditional restore methodologies. They are slow and cumbersome. You have to restore data back to every individual server, which is time-consuming and complex. Next-generation data protection solves these challenges.
[3] When you think about recovery first, protecting the data becomes easier.
- Being proactive to optimize for restoration of data makes it simpler on the backend. You won’t be caught flat-footed. It’s a must-have knowing that your company has the appropriate amount of automation to safeguard your data infrastructure. With automated cyber protection and cyber detection on primary storage, you ─ and the CIO, CTO, CEO, and CFO ─ will sleep better at night.
[4] Get your data back in the snap of your fingers.
- Recovery of data has to be fast. Indeed, it needs to be ultra-fast. If it’s slow (i.e. days to recover data), then it’s not working at the speed of enterprise business. It’s not working at the speed of compute. With the right cyber storage resilient capability built into your storage infrastructure, you can get your data back within seconds.
[5] You have gained leverage back from the attackers.
- Do not underestimate your ability to gain an advantage on cyber criminals. Cyber resilient storage is the first place to look for your tool to gain leverage.
Don’t settle for bolt-on solutions. Bolt-ons simply help to show what is happening in backup. Instead, you need cyber storage resilience to be built into the primary storage systems. It’s best to put cyber recovery at the forefront of your thinking.
About the Author
Eric Herzog is the Chief Marketing Officer at Infinidat. Prior to joining Infinidat, Herzog was CMO and VP of Global Storage Channels at IBM Storage Solutions. His executive leadership experience also includes: CMO and Senior VP of Alliances for all-flash storage provider Violin Memory, and Senior Vice President of Product Management and Product Marketing for EMC’s Enterprise & Mid-range Systems Division. Eric can be reached online at @zoginstor on X or https://www.linkedin.com/in/erherzog/ on LinkedIn and at our company website www.infinidat.com.
