How to Upgrade SLED Backup and Recovery Methods

A recent article in CPO Magazine says that funding is flowing for cybersecurity efforts in every government jurisdiction. One source of that funding is the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), signed by the President in 2021, which allocates $195.3 billion to the states and an additional $130.2 billion to local governments and authorities.

The law lets state, local, and education (SLED) organizations use the IIJA funding for cybersecurity modernization and resilience programs, with 80 percent of those funds required to go directly to local governments and 25 percent directed to rural areas. The states stepped up, too, with more than 300 pieces of legislation related to cybersecurity introduced at the state level in 2022.

If you’re an IT pro responsible for data protection for a SLED organization, it’s clear you need to invest whatever you can in cybersecurity prevention solutions—regardless of where you find the funding. Backup and recovery solutions and software are just as important, given that, when it comes to ransomware attacks, the local government sector is most likely to have its data encrypted, and education is the sector most likely to suffer an attack.

Backup and Recovery Methods: Follow the 3-2-1-1 Rule

Regardless of the technology you choose, the backup and recovery methods you put in place can be the difference between a devastating data loss and full, fast recovery. The 3-2-1-1 strategy is the foundation of a sound solution because it gives you multiple ways to recover, including a last line of defense that ensures your data is always protected.

The strategy is simple. Keep three copies of your data—one primary and two backups—with two copies stored locally in two formats. These can be network-attached storage, tape, or drives. One copy should be stored offsite in the cloud or secure storage. And one copy should be in immutable storage. Stored immutable backups are in a write-once, read-many-times format that can’t be altered or deleted. Since there is no key, as with encryption, there should be no way to “read” or reverse the immutability. So your data can always be recovered.

Immutable Storage: Built for Backups

Arcserve OneXafe was designed to deliver immutable network-attached storage for your unstructured data and backup targets. This scale-out storage solution eliminates the need for forklift upgrades while giving you an immutable object store. OneXafe features continuous data protection (CDP), taking low-overhead snapshots every 90 seconds. Each snapshot is a restorable view of the file system at the moment the snapshot was taken. And it’s easy to go back to any snapshot at a specific point in time and recover entire file systems in minutes.

OneXafe’s scale-out approach lets you add one drive at a time or multiple nodes in a cluster, so you don’t have to allocate storage capacity that you don’t need “just in case.” OneXafe also features the accessibility of SMB and NFS protocols, while its unified architecture keeps management simple and reduces operational costs for storage. It also enables enterprise features like global inline deduplication, compression, and encryption at rest.

Data Protection for Simpler SLED Environments

Your data is precious, regardless of the size of your SLED organization. Arcserve OneXafe Solo is a plug-and-play data protection appliance that streams data directly to Arcserve Cloud Services to ensure operational continuity. Extremely easy to deploy, with cloud-based management from anywhere via a web browser, OneXafe Solo is perfect for smaller institutions and governmental agencies, especially those with remote and branch offices that also need data protection.

OneXafe Solo also delivers cost-effective, enterprise-class features, including the ability to quickly boot up backup images as virtual machines (VMs) using patented VirtualBoot technology. You can recover files and folders in seconds and entire systems in minutes. And OneXafe Solo offers both host-based and agent-based data protection, complete with physical and virtual system recovery and set-and-forget, SLA-based policy management.

Upgrade Your Backup and Recovery Capabilities

Whether you work in local government, education, or any public institution, learn how Arcserve solutions can support your data protection, backup, and disaster recovery strategy by talking to an Arcserve technology partner. To learn more about Arcserve OneXafe, check out our free demo.