How Immutable Storage Ensures Data Resilience

By René Claus, MSP Sales Director, Arcserve EMEA

Virtually every company today depends heavily on data. Data drives decision-making, improves efficiency, and helps you stay one step ahead of competitors. However, you must carefully manage the vast amount of data you collect and store. 

Countless regulations and requirements applying to the collection and storage of data must be followed if you are to stay in legal compliance. That can be difficult and often requires specialized knowledge. That’s important because the legal and financial consequences of noncompliance can be steep.

Companies worldwide must constantly deal with data protection and security regulations, even as these regulations constantly evolve. You must stay informed and adapt your policies and practices to avoid hefty fines and damage to your reputation. 

The European Union’s (EU) Digital Operational Resilience ACT (DORA) is one example. This regulation applies to financial institutions, including banks, insurance companies, investment companies, and cryptocurrency service providers. The regulation ensures that these organizations have solid data protection solutions in place. 

The challenge is that DORA doesn’t only apply to financial institutions. It also applies to all other companies with whom they outsource their technology services, whether inside or outside the EU. That means many companies are subject to the DORA regulation—but don’t know it.

Immutable Storage and Compliance

There are a variety of technology solutions you can use to comply with data security regulations. Immutable data storage is one of the most valuable of those technologies. According to TechTarget, one of the critical benefits of immutable storage is its ability to protect against ransomware. Immutability also helps you comply with regulations by giving you a storage system where your data, once written, can’t be altered, modified, or deleted. 

Solutions like Arcserve OneXafe deliver continuous data protection by automatically creating and storing snapshots. If your primary systems are compromised by ransomware, hardware failure, or other disasters, you can quickly and completely restore your data and return to normal operations. Immutable storage is particularly useful in industries with strict compliance and data regulations, like healthcare, finance, and government.

The immutability of stored data ensures compliance because it ensures the security of your data. Immutability makes it virtually impossible for hackers to damage your operations, even if they gain access to your network. That’s because the data snapshots can’t be changed, overwritten, or deleted. It also ensures you comply with data retention regulations.

Immutability in the Real World

One example of a company successfully meeting data compliance requirements is Concorde Motorhomes, a manufacturer of luxury motorhomes. The company must retain the historical data of all vehicles it has sold since 1985. Concorde also must ensure that all data relating to a specific vehicle is retained, such as the components used throughout, as motorhomes have an extremely long lifespan and feature extensive customization.

Any data loss would be critical for Concorde and have severe consequences from production to customer satisfaction. That’s why the company uses Arcserve OneXafe as an immutable network-attached storage solution that creates snapshots every 90 seconds. This ensures Concorde meets the highest security, scalability, and data compliance levels. And the company can recover quickly from a data disaster.

Cloud Services Simplify Compliance

Another simple and effective way to ensure compliance with data security regulations is to work with a cloud-based data backup and disaster recovery provider. Cloud-based solutions—such as Arcserve Cloud Services—offer scalability and flexibility that traditional backup and recovery solutions often lack. These solutions let your organization quickly expand backup and recovery capabilities without investing in additional hardware or infrastructure.

You should work closely with your cloud provider to stay informed about updates and changes to compliance requirements. A good cloud provider will also help you regularly review and update your backup and recovery strategies to ensure compliance.

Many cloud providers, like Arcserve, offer geographic redundancy, so your data is stored in more than one data center within any given region. Arcserve and other cloud providers also ensure that you can meet data sovereignty or residency requirements—meaning user data is stored in the region where it is generated—as required by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).  

You must also understand the shared responsibility model many cloud providers employ. While cloud providers usually take responsibility for the security of their cloud infrastructure, you are responsible for securing your data and applications. But cloud providers also simplify data management, taking care of maintenance and updates so your IT team can focus on strategic tasks, making them valuable partners. 

Secure Data Storage Is Crucial to Business Success

Every organization deals with an accelerating feedback loop, where the amount of data generated increases in size and value. That’s why hackers are targeting your data with increasing sophistication—think AI—and regulators are imposing ever-tighter rules to protect it. 

The good news is that modern data protection technologies can keep up with this cycle, ensure your data is safe, and keep your operations moving.

To help you determine the optimal immutable storage and data resilience solutions for your requirements, choose an Arcserve technology partner.

To learn more about Arcserve OneXafe, request a demo.