Ransomware attacks are a growing threat for all companies across all countries and regions and are a major cause of concern and priority for company CISO’s.
How do they occur ?
An external party manages to gain access to a company’s data. This can be through Operating System vulnerabilities, email attachments containing a ransomware virus, or other infrastructure or software vulnerabilities with an organization. Once an external party has gained access to the data they encrypt it with a key so that it cannot be accessed. They then contact the company offering to provide a key if they receive a payment, often in untraceable currency transaction such as Bitcoin.
The problem
Many strategies focus on either some form of prevention or some form of containment. Containment often involves particular data stores and the hard fact for most companies is that they use multiple data stores (multi-cloud) and they are not always able to provide a good form of prevention. Prevention often works in a way that, when a potential Ransomware attack is detected, it is prevented from continuing to encrypt all files. There is still the need however for recovery of the files that have been encrypted.
Backup and Archive strategies
Backup and archive strategies can be an effective way of dealing with such attacks at a point in time but the delta between when the last backup or archive was taken leads to exposure. Restore can also often be time consuming.
What the Enterprise File Fabric provides
The File Fabric provides a multi-storage continuous versioning feature that works in a similar way to file snapshot technologies in that every change to every file is captured and stored on a secondary cloud resource.
The primary storage source can be any of the data sources that you have in house that you wish to protect, such as Windows filers, NAS or SAN data, Object Storage, or even a cloud based resource such as Amazon S3, Google Storage,Azure, Office 365 etc.
This secondary storage resource can be, for example, a separate bucket on the same storage cloud, such as Amazon S3 or it could be an entirely different storage platform such as Azure or low cost storage options such as Google Nearline.
Continuous protection is one advantage that the File Fabric can help provide and on-demand recovery, which reduces time to date, is another.
Recovery is very straightforward, simply a right click and choosing the historic version of the file or folder to restore. This can be enabled for end users or for particular roles only, dependent on how a company want so handle it.
Summary
The Enterprise File Fabric offers multi-storage continuous protection and on-demand recovery for any type of data whether it is on-storage or on-premises. It does this in an in-obtrusive no lock-in type of way.
If you would like to find out more or schedule a demo then please contact us.
** Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
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