Cyber resiliency remains elusive for most organizations, especially in the context of ransomware attacks. According to an ESG survey, just 14% of organizations recover all their data after a ransomware attack—even after paying the ransom. In the Hiscox “Cyber Readiness Report 2022”, respondents reported a rise in both cyber and ransomware attacks and the cost of cyber incidents.
Organizations need a platform that combines data security and data management in a single unified environment that frees data from silos, securely, and makes it available and accessible in support of the business. With this platform, organizations can safely back up and restore data in case of a cyber incident with speed and confidence.
For cyber resilience, the data security and management platform needs to:
1) Implement a backup and recovery solution that prevents tampering with the data and platform
The foundation for data resilience is the immutability of backup data and the security of the backup platform. Immutability helps prevent threat actors from changing/tampering/deleting backup data. And for the backup platform, only authorized staff can change settings and backup schedules. With these capabilities, organizations can confidently rely on the integrity of the backup data for recovery.
2) Support and amplify existing cyber defenses
While cybersecurity defenses continue to improve and adjust to threat actor tactics, they may be compromised by sophisticated zero-day attacks. And when cybersecurity defenses detect attacks, they have little control over data resilience solutions to implement recovery after incident response teams have investigated and contained threats.
In support of cybersecurity defenses, data resilience solutions have the unique ability to analyze all mission-critical data during routine backup processes. With the platform leveraging ML, changes in data that can indicate an emerging attack can be identified as anomalies and then routed to incident response teams. This means integrating into security operation centers (SOCs) that are powered by SIEM and SOAR solutions. Playbooks then guide the response to the data anomalies including the recovery of data and systems.
3) Provide confident and rapid recovery measured in hours vs days and weeks
Confident and rapid recovery provides organizations with reliable and fast restoration of critical business processes and data to meet their demanding recovery time objectives (RTOs). First, based on ML, platforms should provide organizations with the last known good recovery point and powerful search so that organizations can ascertain the status of specific data instances. Next, they need to validate that the recovery data does not reintroduce vulnerabilities and threats by scanning for known vulnerabilities and indicators of compromise (IOCs) provided by threat intelligence.
Finally, highly scalable architecture fed by complete backups of all critical data and processes is needed, so that organizations can recover hundreds of VMs, files, or any size database instantly. This process allows IT staff to meet business SLAs while saving time and resources.
Adding to Cohesity’s award-winning capabilities, the 7.0 software release of Cohesity Data Cloud provides key capabilities to help organizations achieve their cyber resilience goals:
As noted in the Forrester Wave “Data Resilience Solution Suites, Q4 2022”, “Today’s enterprises are transitioning to a hybrid cloud world. This means that they must not only back up data in diverse infrastructure environments but also secure that data (and the backup infrastructure) from cyberthreats, recover from failure faster, navigate shared-responsibility models for hosted services, and address data privacy and sovereignty concerns—all while expanding automation, increasing self-service capabilities, and streamlining management of backup-and-restore capabilities.”
Cohesity 7.0 provides key capabilities for cyber resilience by supporting the need for reliable and confident recovery and for integrated cybersecurity and data security and management. Contact your Cohesity account representative to learn more.
To learn more about Cohesity Data Cloud Release 7.0, read our press release.