Modernize Your New Year’s Resolutions with Cyber Resiliency

At the beginning of every year, countless individuals set goals for themselves hoping to spark positive change in their lives. These resolutions often have recurring themes including health and fitness goals, personal development and learning new hobbies.

But what about your resolutions and long-term goals for your business? In our digital, data-driven world it’s time to modernize New Year’s Resolutions to include cyber fitness in order to protect your organization’s most valuable asset – your data.

A recent Gartner® report investigated backup platform features that aid in protecting critical data from ransomware attacks and that accelerate recovery. To get you started, here are two key recommendations that can improve your organization’s cyber resiliency:

◉ Immutable Data Vault (IDV) – Gartner® defines an IDV as “an immutable, air-gapped tertiary independent copy of the backup in a secure environment for safeguarding backups against ransomware and insider attacks.”¹ Sophisticated ransomware attacks are now targeting your backups to gain control of your insurance policy to business continuity. PowerProtect Cyber Recovery offers secure file locking and retention capabilities that create unchangeable data copies within the Cyber Recovery vault. Using the Compliance Mode Retention Lock capability from Dell EMC PowerProtect appliances, data is prevented from deletion or change for a set time period. The lock cannot be overridden, even by an administrator with full privileges. PowerProtect Cyber Recovery takes this one step further with automated workflows that securely move business critical data to the Cyber Recovery vault via an operational air gap. When the air gap is in a locked state — no data can flow — there is no access to any part of the solution. When unlocked, which is done to update or sync data, the operation is controlled from the secure, vaulted side, not from production.

◉ Isolated Recovery Environment (IRE) –According to Gartner®, “an IRE is a dedicated isolated secure recovery environment equipped with resources to verify and recover data from an immutable backup copy and does not replace traditional backup and DR systems. An IRE is meant to recover in a protected environment, independent of the production environment, while hackers might still have access to the production environment.”¹ Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery provides a physically and logically isolated vault that is disconnected from corporate and backup networks and restricted from users who don’t have the proper clearance.

Gartner® suggests that organizations should implement a combination of these two solutions. Specifically, “isolated recovery environments (IREs) with immutable data vaults (IDVs) provide the highest level of security and recovery against insider threats, ransomware and other forms of hacking. However, they are not immune to replicating compromised data from an attack, such as encrypted backup data and require significant additional investment.”¹ Organizations who implement IREs and IDVs still need to be able to identify known-good backups of their data, and this is where Dell Technologies comes in.

CyberSense analytics are fully integrated with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery and monitors files and databases within the backup copy to determine if an attack has occurred by analyzing the data’s integrity and helps accelerate data recovery within the security of the Cyber Recovery vault. After identifying clean copies of data, you can leverage Cyber Recovery to recover your data and resume business operations with confidence.

These resolutions will go a long way towards improving your cyber fitness and making 2022 your most cyber resilient year yet. At Dell Technologies, we stop at nothing to be your trusted partner for modern security solutions and services that enhance IT resiliency, reduce complexity and provide peace of mind that your organization and your data are protected. Learn more about Dell’s portfolio of IT security solutions here.

¹ Gartner, Innovation Insight for Leveraging Isolated Recovery Environments and Immutable Data Vaults, Jerry Rozeman, Michael Hoeck, 27 May 2021

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Source: delltechnologies.com