Storage is essential for a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy

Issue 3 2022 Integrated Solutions, Cyber Security


Eric Herzog.

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.




Share this article:
Share via emailShare via LinkedInPrint this page



Further reading:

Insights from the 2023 Cloud Security Report
News Cyber Security
Increased costs, compliance requirements, hybrid and multi-cloud complexities, reduced visibility, and a lack of skilled practitioners cause organisations to slow or adjust their cloud adoption strategies.

Read more...
Convergence of cyber and physical security
Integrated Solutions Security Services & Risk Management
The overlap between cybersecurity and physical security will necessitate the integration of cyber and physical security in order to enable the sharing of events to the same security operations centre.

Read more...
New algorithm for OT cybersecurity risk management
Industrial (Industry) Cyber Security News Commercial (Industry)
OTORIO’s new risk management model and attack graph analysis algorithm technology, calculates OT cybersecurity threats and provides risk mitigation actions, prioritised according to actual exposure and potential impact on operations.

Read more...
Success in business process best practices
Technews Publishing Kleyn Change Management Editor's Choice Integrated Solutions Security Services & Risk Management
This month we commandeer time with the woman who is spearheading our national conversation on Women in Security, Lesley-Anne Kleyn, to get to know the lady herself a little better.

Read more...
Addressing the SCADA in the room
Industrial (Industry) Cyber Security
Few other sectors command the breadth of purpose-built and custom devices necessary to function, as the industrial and manufacturing industries. These unique devices create an uncommon risk that must be assessed and understood to fully protect against incoming attacks.

Read more...
Unlock seamless security with integrated products
Secutel Technologies Integrated Solutions Products
By combining SecuVue and Secutraq, Secutel has created a system that enables users to configure analytics, facial recognition, pose detection, and XFS among other security triggers modern service providers require.

Read more...
Integrated guarding services
XtraVision Integrated Solutions Access Control & Identity Management Industrial (Industry)
XtraVision offers a few tips on how to go about planning and setting up an integrated approach to sustainable and successful security services, from the initial risk assessment to the technology and people required.

Read more...
Paxton secures multi-tenant office in Cape Town
Paxton Integrated Solutions Access Control & Identity Management Products
Cecilia Square in Paarl, Cape Town is an office building from where several businesses operate. The multi-tenant site has recently undergone a full refurbishment, including a complete upgrade of its security system for access control.

Read more...
Bi-directional integration of Gallagher and Qognify
Gallagher Integrated Solutions Products
In a world of converging technology ecosystems, siloed solutions are no longer viable; this applies in particular to physical security, where only combined information enables a comprehensive assessment of a situation and a timely response.

Read more...
Vulnerabilities in industrial cellular routers’ cloud management platforms
Industrial (Industry) Cyber Security Security Services & Risk Management
Research from OTORIO, a provider of operational technology cyber and digital risk management solutions, unveils cyber risks in M2M protocols and asset registration that expose hundreds of thousands of devices and OT networks to attack

Read more...