World Backup Day 2024: Protect Your Enterprise’s Data with Cyber Secure Backup

World Backup Day has a clear, compelling message that is just as relevant and timely for enterprises today as it is for individual consumers: “Be prepared against data loss and data theft.” The organizers of World Backup Day tout March 31st as “the day to prevent data loss.” Indeed, this should be a mandate every day. With data backup as king in a chess game-like strategy to combat cyberattacks, preparation is everything.

But what’s a CIO, CISO, CTO, CDO or other IT leader to do when traditional approaches to backup of data are outdated, insufficient, and compromised? What if the way you are backing up data in an enterprise is actually the weak link?

Don’t be fooled! Moving data to an online repository as a backup file is not the same as putting the data in an air-tight cyber repository. Cybercriminals have become immensely sophisticated to exploit the weakness of backup, as well as the weakness in enterprise primary storage. Just imagine a cybercriminal hacking into your backup system and corrupting the backup data. If you ever try to move corrupt data from your backup to production-level primary storage, you are asking for more trouble.

Conceived in an era where meeting backup windows was the most critical design principle, traditional backup products were engineered to primarily provide high ingest rates by utilizing inline deduplication techniques. However, they fell short when it was time to run recovery operations with incredibly slow recovery times.

The type of backup that actually helps against cyberattacks is not the same backup as yesteryear. The escalation of cyber threats, digital challenges and outright attacks in today’s cyber-verse has changed everything, requiring new, more effective strategies for data backup. The first question to ask is: where is the backup data stored? The answer is simple: in enterprise storage (specifically, secondary storage). The next question is about what has to happen to make secondary storage truly cyber secure. The answer is multifaceted.

With ransomware, malware and other cyberattacks increasingly targeting secondary storage, you need to outthink and outpace the cybercriminals. You don’t need to be “Superman,” but you do need cyber resilient storage with the most modern backup capabilities, including immutable snapshots, logical air gapping, fenced forensic environment, and near-instantaneous recovery.

When ransomware takes data hostage, it can destroy or corrupt backup copies of data. It has caused businesses of all sizes to shut down operations overnight, lose customers, and have their reputations tarnished and, for publicly-traded companies in the US, you must file public government documentation on the impact of the cyberattack.

Ransomware and malware put your enterprise data at significant risk. To address the challenge, it’s important for an enterprise to build cyber resilience into secondary storage to protect backup copies of data.

Modern data protection goes beyond traditional backup, restore, and disaster recovery. Organizations need a comprehensive protection scheme that delivers on detection and prevention, but also provides a quick and effective recovery process in case the business finds itself being hit with a crippling cyberattack.

Cyber resilience is at the core of our InfiniBox® and InfiniGuard® solutions with our industry acclaimed InfiniSafe® cyber storage capabilities that have been absolutely game-changing for enterprise customers, as well as making cyber recovery of data nearly instantaneous.

Infinidat provides cyber resilience through our InfiniSafe software on our InfiniGuard purpose-built backup appliance solution, compatible with all the major backup packages (Commvault, Veritas, Veeam, IBM Protect and many more). InfiniGuard offers unmatched backup and lightning-fast recovery performance, at scale, for an enterprise’s data protection needs. It also delivers the guaranteed advanced cyber resilience and cyber recovery in a tightly honed solution. Cybersecurity features on storage systems have become necessary for enterprises seeking to protect their backups and accelerate cyber recovery.

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. Infinidat’s InfiniBox and InfiniGuard facilitate both of those activities with the InfiniBox optimized for customers who chose to do data reduction with their backup software, while the InfiniGuard is optimized for customer who want to do data reduction in their storage layer. Infinidat delivers these high levels of availability and performance, as their enterprise-based architecture inherently provides a triple-active redundant architecture.

All of our solutions are designed for enterprise-class reliability and availability. Secondary storage is no exception. InfiniGuard’s architecture is fully active/active with a ready standby node built in. We leverage a stateless recovery model, greatly reducing complexity; this makes it quick and easy to ensure your backup and recovery system is always highly available and fully optimized while maintaining full data integrity.

By incorporating advanced primary storage-grade technology from InfiniBox into the InfiniGuard design, Infinidat has eliminated the inherent tradeoff between backup performance, data reduction, and recovery speed, which existed in the backup storage market for years. Where traditionally customers had to choose and could only fulfill two of the above parameters, InfiniGuard provides all three objectives, delivering on deduplication and backup speeds as traditional competitive backup appliances do, but also delivers on today’s most demanding SLAs for fast recovery times.

We made it a priority to enhance our InfiniSafe cyber storage resilience solution portfolio with cyber detection. InfiniSafe Cyber Detection provides highly intelligent deep scanning and indexing needed to identify potential issues. It is designed to help enterprises resist and quickly recover from cyberattacks. InfiniSafe Cyber Detection inspects the full breadth of files, applications, core storage infrastructure (such as volumes), and databases for signs of cyber threats for storage environments, helping ensure all data that needs to be recovered has integrity.

In the event that you need to recover your data, rest assured knowing that immutable snapshot recoverability is guaranteed − and guaranteed to be fast. With InfiniSafe Cyber Storage Guarantees, recover immutable snapshots in one minute or less for InfiniBox or InfiniBox SSA and 20 minutes or less for InfiniGuard, regardless of data set size.

In one of our recent webinars on enterprise storage cyber resilience and recovery, we recovered a Veeam backup repository of 20 petabytes of data in 11 minutes and 55 seconds on an InfiniGuard and >190TB on an InfiniBox in just 4 seconds.

Infinidat’s rich, enterprise feature set makes storage a key part of your overall corporate cybersecurity strategy.

Join the conversation on social media at hashtag #WorldBackupDay to share your thoughts about backup or to ask our expert Infinidat team a question about backup. To watch the webinar, click here.