Protect Your Enterprise’s Data with Next-Generation Cyber Secure Backup

In an environment where cyberattacks are inevitable and extremely costly, it’s essential for an enterprise to build cyber resilience into secondary storage to protect backup copies of data. It’s a strong call to action for cyber security decision-makers, such as CISOs, to ensure they have cyber secure backups of their entire storage infrastructure. This should be part of a next-generation data protection framework that shrinks the cyber threat window and guards against the possibility of business operations being brought to a standstill.

Advanced next-generation data protection approach

Next-generation data protection is advanced, end-to-end data protection with a comprehensive cyber centric approach that goes beyond traditional backup, restore and disaster recovery strategies. Putting your enterprise’s data in an air-tight cyber repository is not the same as the conventional means of moving data to an online repository as a backup file. Traditional backup environments are high-value targets for cyberattacks, because they contain many vulnerabilities. Next-generation data protection, the type of backup that actually combats cyberattacks most effectively, is not the same.

Here’s how they differ. Traditional backup products were engineered to provide high ingest rates by utilising inline deduplication techniques. They fall short because their recovery times are way, way too slow for an era where 24x7x365 IT operations are the norm.

In contrast, a next-generation approach protects data in its original state and isolates it with “immutable snapshots,” whilst validating that the isolated data is free of cyber corruption. Immutable snapshots are snapshots of enterprise data that cannot be changed. This ensures that in the wake of a cyberattack, data can be restored confidently and quickly, minimising downtime costs.

A reliable path to cyber secure backup

With ransomware, malware, and other cyberattacks increasingly targeting secondary storage, cyber resilient storage with next-generation backup capabilities, including cyber detection, is the most reliable path to cyber secure backup. Addressing these threats requires us to rethink the problem and augment data protection strategies that counter the way cyberattacks work.

Enterprises need a cyber-focused, recovery-first strategy that enables detection and provides near-instantaneous recovery of data in the event of a cyberattack. This kind of strategy is built on the end-goal - securing and validating your organisation’s critical data at the source. It is the best way to prevent damage to your business and neither traditional data protection nor modern data protection approaches will get you there.

Assessing your data recovery needs

Instead, cyber security features on secondary storage systems have become necessary for enterprises seeking to protect their backups from cyber threats and accelerate cyber recovery. These need to be an essential focus of your business recovery objectives and next-generation data protection and recovery focus.

To assess your needs, ask yourself these questions:

· Where are the data assets you need to recover located?

· How are they being protected?

· How fast would they need to be recovered?

· How many tens of millions of pounds would your business lose for every minute or hour that goes by without recovering your mission-critical data?

· What other business impact could come from the speed at which you can recover data?

· Do you have business recovery objectives as a central part of your cyber strategy?

· How much risk is your enterprise willing to be exposed to?

Cyber-focused, recovery-first strategy

Without cyber secure backup rooted in a cyber-focused, recovery-first strategy, enterprises are facing higher levels of cyber risk from ransomware and malware. The threat is well-understood.

When ransomware takes data “hostage,” it can destroy or corrupt backup copies of data. This has caused businesses of all sizes to lose customers, shut down operations overnight and have their reputations tarnished forever.

Data aggregated from various independent and industry sources estimate the cost of post cyberattack downtime can be as high as £6,700 per minute, depending on industry and incident specifics. Given that enterprises are already facing so much economic uncertainty, this clearly needs to change. No organisation can afford to suffer downtime - especially since next-generation data protection is readily available.

With so much at stake, why would you not deploy cyber secure backup on your secondary storage and ensure your enterprise is fully cyber resilient? Cyber resilience

should lie at the core of enterprise storage solutions with the capability to make cyber recovery of data virtually instantaneous. This can be game-changing for enterprises.

Highly available backup targets have become a necessity for enterprises. In addition to continually servicing backups, backup targets may need to facilitate fast restores and perform forensic analysis. This should ideally be based on a stateless recovery model to significantly reduce complexity. It makes it quick and easy to ensure your backup and recovery system is always highly available and fully optimised, while maintaining full data integrity.

If you’re thinking about cyber secure backup today, consider this question: What if it’s the way that your enterprise is backing up data that is the weak link? Ensure cyber secure backup is on your priority list.