Nicole Georgiou
In this blog post, our partner Panzura outlines the challenges with data protection & disaster recovery today and how Hybrid Cloud can help.
According to a report conducted by Datto1, the cost of downtime can amount to $11,600 per minute. Therefore businesses, especially those within the Buildings & Infrastructure and Product Design & Lifecycle who are working to tight deadlines for client projects, have every incentive to protect against it.
However, ever-expanding global operations, dispersed teams and an explosion of data growth, are growing the gap between data accessibility and security2. Many organisations are juggling multiple out-of-sync data islands for backup and production which means more data, less visibility, and more places to be breached which can make you a ripe target for ransomware and other cyber threats.
To avoid this, you want to keep your business data secure. Whether by accident or a malicious threat, data incidents occur and you need a way to protect against them. This can be achieved by making sure your data is:
In addition to protecting your data and implementing security measures, businesses also need to balance for:
Cyber attackers thrive by exploiting chaotic space, so wise teams make it their mission to keep their space clean. Centralised and deduplicated, a solid hybrid cloud file system gives unity to an increasingly fragmented datascape. Hybrid cloud NAS solutions like Panzura create the foundation for teams to protect efficiently and prepare data for effortless recovery as-needed.
In addition to the steps mentioned above, it’s also beneficial to have walls around your data that block familiar threats eg malware. You can then support this wall with security — both machine and human — that watches and learns trusted business activities to spot anything and anyone acting abnormally. Together, these forces can regain visibility of exposed data, throttle access permissions to only include active staff, and granularly tighten the seal around your most sensitive data.
Machine learning built into a solution like Panzura can also help when users open ransomware bait, or if unrecognised malicious code slips past your anti-virus, by locking down compromised accounts and spotting similar activity in the future.
As mentioned, you only want your data to be accessed by those who are authorised. With a hybrid cloud solution like Panzura, you can obscure & block your data to be visible internally and only with your key. Real-time encryption ensures that any data that slips from your grasp will make no sense without your key to unscramble it, wherever your data goes.
Whether members of your team mistakenly delete or edit files or whether your files have been hacked, storage solutions like Panzura can protect against this if your data becomes immutable — aka unable to be changed. Data is automatically stored in chunks to be edited and used in lightweight portions, with changes saved in new blocks versus the originals. This keeps the data usable rather than “truly” immutable.
Change history snapshots, and auto-identified compromised blocks, can be traced through the thread of new data chunks, leaving a trail of restore points in case of disaster. Effective hybrid cloud solutions also automatically consolidate, compress, and sync this data across each global worksite for a united, deduplicated, space-saving datascape.
Panzura can also keep original data preserved as the infected data is written to new data blocks. The infrastructure is ransomware-resistant by nature, and the means to restore the entire pre-infection global file system is baked-in.
Hybrid solutions ensure each site across the entire global file system collectively syncs and equally shares the load of operations. Unlike traditional backup methods, a single device failure can easily be replaced and swapped with no true disruption to the rest of the file network.
If your systems have been compromised, cloud-based access means no delays for backup support, media retrieval, and installation, dramatically improving your recovery time. With this hardened foundation, locally cached flash recovery allows immediate data recovery no matter what site you’re working from.
Ultimately, organisations find they can circumvent painful workflow disruptions and costly payoffs simply with better data storage. Panzura’s biggest advantage is its inherent simplicity. When you know exactly what is going on with your data, you can take full control of it. Supported by a single security and data management framework, the fight against ransomware and other threats is back in your hands.
Find out more about hybrid cloud solution Panzura here or get in touch with us.
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