HPE Zerto provides an avenue for organizations to become ransomware resilient. Why is this needed? Ransomware continues to plague public- and private-sector organizations worldwide, disrupting mission-critical services and creating enormous economic risk. Experts forecast global ransomware damages will exceed $265 billion by the end of the decade. This is due in part to the rise of ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) delivery mechanisms. These allow threat actors with only rudimentary skills to cash in on the cybercrime economy.
While there are myriad steps organizations should take to improve data protection and fend off ransomware attacks, it isn’t possible to create an entirely foolproof defense. As such, companies must supplement traditional preventive measures with solutions that help them withstand and recover from threats that slip through their defenses and encrypt their critical data.
One key to mitigating a ransomware attack is a robust recovery solution that limits downtime and ensures that data can be reliably accessed in the event of an attack. Since many ransomware strains also target backup systems, true ransomware resilience requires the ability to create immutable backups that are isolated from local systems and cannot be altered or deleted.
Zerto, part of the HPE suite of solutions since 2021, is a company specializing in continuous data protection (CDP) solutions for on-premises, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. They recently announced a series of product updates that deliver ransomware resilience with rapid recovery of immutable backups. Key features of Zerto 9.5 include:
Instant File Restore
Zerto continuously backs up applications, files or blocks of data whenever any change is made. While doing this, it creates an electronic journal of complete storage snapshots — one snapshot for every instant in time that data modification occurs. This enables data to be restored within minutes from thousands of points in time, all only seconds apart. With this capability, organizations can limit data loss to just a few seconds after a ransomware attack. You can choose the exact point in time from which you wish to recover. YOu can also choose the exact item you want to recover.
Application-Centric Recovery
Modern applications are usually made up of many components, including multiple virtual machines (VMs) or many container resources and services. Zerto can recover individual applications, single VMs or containers — even individual files and folders from inside VMs and containers — all from the journal.
Immutability
Zerto makes it easy to create isolated, immutable data backups by using Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3 storage as targets for long-term retention (LTR). With the Zerto user interface, organizations can set how long backups are to remain encrypted. You can also set how long they remain unaltered to ensure maximum protection from accidental data overwrites. Instead of hours to restore files, folders, or even full VMs from traditional backups, LTR allows restoration in seconds.
It’s important to keep systems updated and patched, employ access management and implement other controls in efforts to prevent ransomware. However, you must be prepared to limit the damage of a successful attack. Contact us to learn more about using Zerto to improve your ransomware resilience.
Now What?
Ready to get serious about the threat of ransomware? We can help. Contact PKA today and let’s talk about how we can help your organization become more ransomware resilient.
