Cyber resilience: Where data protection and data security meet

How can you protect your company from the rising threat of ransomware and other data security attacks? In today’s fast-evolving business world, data is the lifeblood of organizations. Targeted ransomware attacks and other threats put your data in the crosshairs of criminals who want to exploit it. Organizations feel the pressure to protect their data and stay out of the headlines. According to one study, cyberthreats are business executives’ top concern for 2022.^{Allianz, Allianz Risk Barometer 2022, January 18, 2022}

Increasingly, the long-siloed functions of data security and data protection collide as companies search for effective solutions to defend their data and move toward cyber resilience. In this blog, I introduce NetApp’s approach to cyber resilience and explore several exciting innovations that we’re launching in the market.

Ransomware and other data security threats are challenging organizations to the core. It’s necessary to protect the perimeter from malicious actors, but protecting your organization from data loss or theft requires a new set of tools and skills. Successful data protection and data security teams are best armed to thwart attacks when their solutions and workflows are tightly integrated. Cyber resilience is the integrated approach to address data protection and data security. It starts with a solid foundation of data protection that includes high-availability solutions, with redundant components and mirrored data to address the challenges of disaster recovery and business continuity. It also includes data recovery with granular, efficient backup and long-term archiving.

These data protection solutions combine with intelligent threat detection to identify anomalies across the organization, including storage behavior and user behavior anomalies. Finally, they offer the ability to quickly remediate threats and bring data and applications back online with minimal disruption if an attack breaks through the defenses.

Designing the right solutions starts with your data. NetApp approaches cyber resilience from the inside out using a Zero Trust approach. Ransomware solutions and other security protections built into NetApp^® ONTAP^® and other data services applications protect our customers against the growing demands of maintaining cyber resilience in the enterprise.

In a rapidly evolving threat landscape, ransomware protection demands fast backup and recovery, anomaly detection powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and rapid response capabilities. NetApp expands our customers’ ability to detect ransomware anomalies in data and user access profiles to trigger protection and rapid mitigation.

In the fight against ransomware, NetApp is committed to increasing visibility across the entire storage ecosystem. In Cloud Manager, the new Ransomware Protection Dashboard gathers information from a variety of NetApp solutions and monitors them in a single dashboard that alerts you to potential intrusions or attacks.

Organizations that need deeper professional services support on their cybersecurity journeys can rely on the Ransomware Protection and Recovery Service. This newly launched comprehensive service assesses the IT environment, deploys and installs data services based on organization’s needs, offers services management, and aids in recovery if an attack occurs.

NetApp’s backup and recovery solutions are designed to protect data with instant, frequent, low-cost backups and to enable the recovery of large databases in minutes. When disaster strikes, it’s important to be able to rely on easy, low-cost disaster recovery and business continuity protection to any location and any cloud. Many companies are still struggling with these crucial aspects of cyber resilience.

According to a recent study by Veeam,^{Veeam, 2021 Data Protection Trends, 2021} 37% of all backup jobs fail and 34% of all restore jobs fail. In contrast, NetApp’s customer success stories paint a very different picture of what’s possible with the right cyber resilience solutions. For example, some companies are backing up data in 23 seconds^{NetApp case study, All for One delivers SAP data services in any cloud, 2020} and accelerating their recovery time to minutes.^{NetApp case study, Be the Match saves more lives with better data, 2022}

Our latest innovations offer native, integrated backup and data retention tools to simplify data backup and disaster recovery in a variety of settings. For example, in Cloud Backup, NetApp SnapLock^® compliance software enables users to take a NetApp Snapshot™ copy and lock it. Backups can be read, but files can’t be changed, protecting against unwanted data encryption or deletion.

In addition, ONTAP 9.11.1 includes an update for SnapLock for FlexGroup. Users can concatenate volumes with capacity limitations and securely store them in petabyte repositories that can be restored quickly and easily when required.

Cyber resilience also demands that organizations have innovative solutions for data governance and compliance. NetApp offers solutions for data classification and categorization, regulatory compliance, permissions management, and data retention and compliance. New features and innovative updates are enhancing what’s possible in this fast-growing area of our cyber resilience portfolio.

Sophisticated access protections are introducing new ways to thwart hackers who access compromised credentials. ONTAP 9.11.1, our flagship data management software, has added a first-in-market feature called Multi-Admin Verify. During a ransomware attack, a single compromised account enables malicious actors to wreak havoc. ONTAP users can enable Multi-Admin Verify so that critical system functions require verification from multiple administrators. This extra layer of access protection reduces the opportunity for a single compromised account to do significant damage and gives providers greater control over permissions management.

Cyber resilience requires the ability to protect and secure data everywhere with integrated backups, disaster recovery, security, and ransomware protection. NetApp cyber resilience solutions are woven into the very fabric of your data storage, not bolted on.

Start protecting your data with NetApp industry-leading cyber resilience solutions today.