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Back-up securely and restore in seconds

Technology does amazing things today, and if configured correctly, it provides enormous value to everyone, until it doesn’t. Whether it’s a hardware or software failure or ransomware, businesses come to a standstill when technology stops. In the security industry, technology has become indispensable, particularly in the surveillance sector and especially in the control room, which increasingly incorporates tasks for more than just security operations.

But what happens when, for example, ransomware stops your systems? In the past, a back-up would have had to be restored (if one had been made) to recover the data. However, ransomware criminals have caught onto this idea and current malware often hangs around undetected and infects back-ups, whether in the cloud or on physical devices.

For corporations with the financial resources to invest, immutable back-ups are now the standard. When data is backed up, it is scanned for any malware and stored to ensure it can’t be altered (immutability). The idea is that if you are hit with ransomware, you have a clean version of your data to restore without paying a ransom.

Immutability for everyone

Betatrac, a local company, has found a solution that enables companies to store up to 8 TB, including virtual setup of data, onto a device and restore it in 30 seconds in an emergency. The Rapid Access Data Recovery (RADR) technology was designed and built by Salvador Technologies and connects via a USB port. Far from being just another portable hard drive, the device’s built-in intelligence ensures that companies or individuals always have a clean, up-to-date back-up copy of their data.

RADR includes three NVMe disks. One is used to store the ‘baseline’ of the data, which consists of the initial image of the entire disk being backed up – operating system, configuration, licensing and, of course, the data. This is also known as the ‘factory reset’ disk and is never exposed to the user or other nefarious applications. The second and third drives contain the current and previous back-ups. Back-ups are handled automatically at intervals set by the user, but only the current disk is available to the user’s system; the other two are offline.

The key that differentiates RADR is that two disks are electronically offline at all times, providing air-gapped protection for your data. No matter what happens to your system, the malware won’t be copied to the isolated drives, and a back-up will not commence if the RADR agent software detects a potential problem. Users can not only restore data from the device but can boot directly into it in an emergency (to the baseline disk). The baseline disk is never changed after the first back-up and can be used in dire emergencies to restore a clean version of the OS and related files.

Keep systems healthy

The same company also offers a monitoring system. It can be installed on-premises or run in the cloud and monitors all devices’ health, detects cyberattacks, and notifies users if any devices go missing. If a problem is detected, authorised users can automatically be notified via SMS or email.

The system is designed to be easy to use, and Betatrac offers a service to map customers’ IT architectures, determine their needs and run a proof-of-concept to demonstrate the system’s functionality. It will also facilitate the rollout of RADR solutions tailored to each client’s specific requirements.

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