Page 87 - Cyber Defense eMagazine RSAC Special Edition 2025

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.

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