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When downtime can cost an average of $11,600 a minute, enterprises have every incentive to protect against it. However, ever-expanding global operations and an explosion of data growth are growing the gap between data accessibility and security.

Today, many organizations are juggling multiple out-of-sync data islands for backup and production. More data, less visibility, and more places to be breached can make you a ripe target for ransomware and other cyber threats.

To avoid being hit with roughly 16 days of ransomware-induced downtime, the modern enterprise needs to find security while balancing for:

  1. Costs
  2. Latency performance
  3. Ease of data management
  4. Global availability
  5. Durability

The solution? Hybrid cloud. Let’s dive into why an integrated global cloud NAS solution offers the best results in data protection, disaster recovery, and how it stacks up against one of the most potentially damaging threats facing the enterprise.

Today’s Data Protection Challenges

Firstly, we 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.

In other words, your data must be kept:

  1. Undamaged and accessible
  2. Away from unauthorized eyes
  3. Usable only to permitted users

Legacy NAS data centers and ad-hoc cloud solutions lead to tons of un-consolidated data silos. Duplicate files run rampant as they’re copied to the cloud, data backups may be days out-of-date, and unmanaged data fills each storage location devours more time and money to maintain.

Today’s Disaster Recovery Challenges

When defenses are breached — not if — your business needs to be ready for a speedy recovery. Typically, teams find they can confidently restore their business-critical data and operations if they can keep their data backups:

  1.  Affordable
  2. Durable 
  3. Available 
  4. Rapidly recoverable
  5. Consistent
  6. Compliant

Local offline media, nearline disks, and local NAS data centers each struggle to balance these needs. Using multiple solutions for balance carries the same fragmented, outdated storage issues we explored in data protection. Most important, none of these solutions are hardened against data transformation like via ransomware.

How Hybrid Cloud Does BC and DR Better

Cyberattackers thrive by exploiting chaotic space, so wise teams make it their mission to keep their space clean.

Centralized and deduplicated, a solid hybrid cloud file system gives unity to an increasingly fragmented datascape. Hybrid cloud NAS solutions create the foundation for teams to protect efficiently and prepare data for effortless recovery as-needed.

Better Dynamic Threat Defense and Response

A savvy hybrid cloud solution can conquer data protection challenges with traditional perimeter antivirus tools, backed by a second shield of multi-layered adaptive defense via machine learning (ML).

To simplify this visual, you’ll want walls around your data that block familiar threats: malware and such. You’ll 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. In case of an actual breach, ML defenses can initiate rapid, automated lockdown of breached accounts for easier operations recovery.

Reliable Data Encryption

Next, you could boost your protection further by obscuring and locking the 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.

If your hybrid cloud solution offers at-rest protection via an AES 256-bit algorithm, and in-transit security at TLS 1.2 encryption, you’re getting advanced security anywhere your data goes.

Enterprise-grade FIPS 140-2 certification lets you trust that the process of locking your data hasn’t been compromised. The result gives your organization the confidence to operate with minimal risk of public data leaks after a system breach.

Immutable Storage and Data Recovery

Of course, people are bound to mistakenly delete or edit files. Storage solutions can protect against this human error if they make your data immutable — aka unable to be changed.

Intelligently immutable 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, i.e. frozen at the state of its creation.

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.

On-Demand Backup Availability and Trusted Durability

For true resilience, global operations have to consider the weight of device failure and data loss.

In any case, your organization likely needs to be able to recover:

  1. Anywhere
  2. At any time
  3. To any reasonable point-of-time
  4. From any data state

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.

With this hardened foundation, locally cached flash recovery allows immediate data recovery no matter what site you’re working from.

Anytime you need to recover, a solution with strong uptime like 99.99999999999999% — that’s 16 9’s of availability — will have you covered.

Cloud-based access means no delays for backup support, media retrieval, and installation, dramatically improving your recovery time.

Finally, the immutable state of the hybrid NAS data offers the resilient breadcrumb trail you’ll need to reverse any lost or disabled part of your file system — individual files, folders, and beyond.

Shift the balance of power in the fight against ransomware.

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What About Ransomware?

Ransomware is a household name feared by most organizations. With businesses and governments predicted to be infected around every 11 seconds in 2021, enterprise data storage needs an effective solution.

Fortunately, intelligent hybrid cloud file systems have the power to combat these threats.

Here’s how a trusted hybrid cloud NAS solution wields the sum of its features against ransomware:

Better dynamic threat defense and response ensure that even a successful breach is a learning tool. When users open ransomware bait or unrecognized malicious code slips past your anti-virus, ML can auto-lockdown compromised accounts and spot similar activity in the future.

Reliable data encryption keeps any threat actors from releasing your sensitive data to the public. You’ve got the keys to your data, and no one else can read it without access. Intellectual property and other info are safe with your hybrid cloud.

Immutable storage and data recovery 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.

On-demand backup availability and trusted durability offer the path back to normalcy from the moment your team discovered the incident. Global sync might seem like a danger in this state, but data snapshots in a centralized structure ensure that everyone is restored back to work at the same time.

Ultimately, organizations find they can circumvent painful workflow disruptions and costly payoffs simply with better data storage.

The hybrid cloud’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.