The sophistication and scale of cyberattacks will continue to increase exponentially around the globe, with experts expecting to see a huge increase in the number of ransomware and mobile attacks in the coming months.
Research by Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that global cybercrime costs will reach $10,5 trillion annually by 2025, up from $3 trillion in 2015. Check Point Research (CPR), in its cybersecurity predictions for 2022, finds that ransom amounts demanded by attackers are predicted to increase in 2022. It further predicts that data breaches will be on a larger scale, with attackers targeting an organisation’s customers and/or business partners for ransoms too.
In light of this fast-growing cyberthreat landscape, industry experts are increasingly urging businesses to turn their focus to developing cyber resilience, which is the ability of an enterprise to limit the impact of security incidents by deploying and arranging appropriate security tools and processes.
Least amount of disruption
The ultimate goal of cyber resiliency is to help an organisation thrive in the face of adverse conditions, including an ever-evolving and complex cyberthreat environment. The concept brings together the areas of information security, business continuity and organisational resilience. Essentially, cyber resilience enables an enterprise to continue to function with the least amount of disruption in the face of increasingly prevalent and sophisticated cyberattacks.
Thus, to safeguard against sophisticated and increasing cyberthreats, organisations need to implement comprehensive enterprise storage cyber resilience solutions with innovative capabilities and enhanced performance for modern data protection, backup, disaster recovery and business continuity.
A state-of-the-art, cyber-resilient enterprise storage solution would therefore ensure that an enterprise is protected against ransomware, malware, internal threats and other potential cyberattacks by accelerating replication to alternative sites, as well as transforming what is possible for modern data protection and backup. This sets a new standard for preparedness in the defence against increasingly dangerous cyberattacks by combining immutable snapshots, logical air-gapping, fenced forensic environments and virtually instantaneous data recovery into a single, high-performance platform.
Restoration in minutes
Logical local and remote air-gapping creates a gap between the management plane and the immutable snapshots of the backup dataset, while remote air-gapping sends data to a remote storage system. The fenced forensic environment provides a safe location to provide forensic analysis of backup datasets, to identify a copy of the data that is free from malware or ransomware and can be safely restored. When a backup dataset without malware or ransomware has been identified, the data can be recovered. Regardless of the size of the dataset, it can be made fully available to the backup software for restoration in minutes.
By using immutable snapshots, cyber-resilient storage platforms ensure that the copies of the data cannot be altered, deleted or edited in any way. This ensures the integrity of the data while reducing recovery time to minutes, rather than hours or days. Together, the immutable snapshots, air-gapping, fenced forensic environment and rapid recovery time are enabled by state-of-the-art technology that was developed to bring a new level of enterprise-grade cyber resilience to enterprises.
Reduced backup windows
With recent enhancements to cyber-resilient enterprise storage platforms, increased system performance means that backup windows can be reduced by as much as 50%. This reduces the impact of the backup process on applications, primary storage and primary servers, while the improved system performance can also reduce the time it takes to perform remote replication. Ultimately, with optimised performance and target-side storage processing, cyber-resilient storage platforms offer unmatched speed and reliability in data backup and maximise effective capacity for petabyte-scale environments.
Another significant benefit of leveraging a cyber-resilient enterprise storage platform is its ability to lower total cost of ownership (TCO). By supporting multiple protocols, these solutions simplify the process to consolidate data protection for multiple systems in a single high-capacity solution. In turn, consolidation reduces the data centre footprint and lowers power and cooling costs, which significantly reduces an enterprise’s data protection TCO without sacrificing performance.
The storage of an organisation’s data, considered to be among its most valuable assets, can no longer be seen as separate from a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. If an enterprise or service provider does not deploy cyber-resilient storage, the damage that cyber criminals can do could be devastating.
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