When it comes to ransomware and cyberattacks, companies realize that one day it will inevitably happen to them. This is the thinking behind cyber resilience—we will be breached, therefore we need to prepare and make that as painless as possible. This has put enormous pressure on IT leaders to start cyber resilience initiatives and show progress toward lowering financial risk for the company.
Unfortunately, much of the discussion on how to do this involves elaborate endpoint protection platforms and expensive recovery tools. IT leaders need a quick win with demonstrable results. The answer to this is to switch backups to immutable storage—without increasing costs to do so. This article will provide an introduction to this concept, but for a deeper dive with the experts, check out the webinar: Become Immutable to Cyberattacks & Ransomware.
Start with a backup plan that covers all environments
RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (recovery point objective) are two widely used metrics to determine the disaster recovery goals for how fast you can return to normal operations (RTO) and how much data you can afford to lose (RPO). The goal for IT is to lower the recovery time (RTO) and be confident that the time is achievable in the event of a disaster. While also better protecting data to minimize the data lost (RPO).
Accomplishing these reductions starts with considering what data you are backing up. Backup orchestration tools can be helpful to manage this process in an automated, yet fully protected way. An important key is to look at backup orchestration that works across all environments from on-premise, to cloud storage, SaaS, virtual machines, and even containers. A Zerto backup orchestration expert dives deeper into how this works in this webinar.
Use immutable storage that speeds recovery
Having a fast backup orchestration solution for recovery is a great start that many companies have already taken, but the aspect that is often overlooked is where the backups are stored. Data backups are often a primary target for attackers, which means that these backups have to be stored with full encryption and immutability. And those are not standard features in most cloud storage.
A perfect option for secure backups is decentralized object storage. Decentralized cloud storage has end-to-end encryption and erasure coding to create immutability included at no extra charge. This is because this type of cloud storage is completely zero-trust, making it the safest, most secure storage platform that exists today. And since this level of security comes standard, combined with its distributed storage network, it is significantly less expensive than cold storage (1/10th the cost of AWS) and ridiculously more cost efficient for hot storage (1/40th the cost of AWS).
Having backups highly secured helps to lower RPO, but RTO is lowered by improving performance. Decentralized storage wins here too. Restoring from a decentralized cloud storage bucket is similar to restoring from a content delivery network (CDN). There are a few reasons for this. One is because the immutable file segments are distributed across the globe with only ⅓ of the segments needed to reconstitute the file. That means that the segments can be pulled from the storage nodes closest to the request, making for 11 9s of durability. And geofencing is available to ensure backups are in the right place for speedy recovery.
Another reason decentralized storage is so fast for recovery is because it was designed for large file transfer. It uses parallelism, pulling from those closest storage nodes, and minimizes the long-tail effect to make downloads as fast as possible. Low latency and higher throughput means a reduction in RTO. A Storj backup and recovery expert explains these concepts in this webinar.
Get a quick win for disaster recovery
Users of Zerto can now get a quick win to improve their RTO and RPO by connecting their
backups of virtual machines to Storj, the enterprise-grade decentralized cloud storage platform. The two connect easily using the S3 protocol and together they provide an easy way to protect backups in a truly immutable way. For more on this integration and the benefits to disaster recovery, watch the webinar: Become Immutable to Cyberattacks & Ransomware.
And for a super-quick win to get you started, the webinar also covers the detailed specifics on how to back up and restore a copy of a virtual Windows file system using Storj as a repository through Zerto’s Long-Term Retention functionality.
