What Is a Unified Data Resilience Platform (and Why Do You Need One)?

Ransomware is everywhere. And it’s knocking on almost every organization’s door. Sophos’ The State of Ransomware 2023 found that 66 percent of surveyed organizations were hit by ransomware in the last year, with 76 percent of those attacks resulting in the victim’s data being encrypted. 

The same report found the associated costs of an attack are astronomical, with the average ransom coming in at $1.54 million and the mean recovery cost, excluding ransom payment, $1.82 million.

But ransomware isn’t the only threat to your business and your data. According to Forbes, in 2022, the United States experienced 18 large-scale climate disasters that in total damage cost the country ​​$175.2 billion. You can bet that IT and data recovery comprise a substantial enough portion of those costs that hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses took a huge financial hit. Given the costs of a disaster—whether it’s a hurricane or a data breach—ensuring your organization is resilient is common sense. 

Backups Are a Big Target

Clearly, recovery using backups is considerably cheaper than the costs of a data disaster. But backups are a primary target because once the hacker encrypts them, your chances of recovery may be limited. One study found that in 21 percent of ransomware attacks, backups were targeted and rendered entirely useless. And sometimes, the recovery costs may be higher than the ransom itself. 

There Is No Silver Bullet

If you’re an IT pro responsible for your organization’s IT resilience, you already know there is no single solution guaranteed to keep your organization and data secure. You need to employ a multi-modal strategy to achieve cyber and data resilience. 

Implement Data Resilience Technologies and Processes

That starts with instituting processes and employing technologies that strengthen your security posture. Employee cybersecurity training should be an ongoing process, given that, according to the Verizon 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report, 74 percent of breaches involve the human element. 

And regularly scheduled disaster recovery tests and exercises should be executed to ensure recovery is possible—before it’s needed. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is a great starting point, offering disaster recovery consultation, documentation, and testing services.

Strengthen Your Cybersecurity Measures 

You’ll want to institute added layers of security to protect your data, including employing identity and access management (IAM) to block unauthorized users. IAM can include single sign-on systems, two-factor authentication, multifactor authentication, privileged access management (PAM), and role-based access controls (RBACs). You’ll see that MFA isn’t perfect if you read this recent post. However, protections minimize the chances that an unauthorized user can access your network.

Choose a Unified Data Resilience Platform 

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework calls for a multi-model approach to ensuring business and data resilience. We’ve built the Arcserve Unified Data Resilience Platform to help you get there. That platform is built on three pillars that ensure your data is safeguarded and can always be recovered.

Prevent

Arcserve’s partnership with cybersecurity leader Sophos means your backups are protected with Sophos Intercept X Advanced for Server, cutting-edge cybersecurity that uses a deep learning neural network to detect known and unknown malware—without relying on signatures. And you can quickly respond to and remove threats with CryptoGuard, which constantly monitors file writes for encrypted files, and WipeGuard, which uses behavioral analysis to stop never-before-seen ransomware and boot-record attacks.   

Protect

Because prevention isn’t foolproof, the Arcserve platform’s second pillar is protection. Regardless of the cause—external threats, disasters, human error, or unplanned outages—Arcserve offers solutions that protect your physical and virtual on-premises, cloud, and SaaS-based data. 

We’ve forged a foundation for data resilience and backup protection that features immutable storage, a write-once-read-many-times format that can’t be altered or deleted. That includes support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 Object Lock. And we protect your data with robust encryption, air gap support, IAM and PAM controls, and more.

Recover

The Arcserve Unified Data Resilience platform makes the most significant difference for you when you need it most—after a successful ransomware attack or another data disaster. Arcserve solutions let you safely spin up copies of physical and virtual systems onsite and offsite or in private and public clouds. That makes near-instant recovery possible and ensures business continuity.

Arcserve: Spanning the Entire Business Continuity Category

At Arcserve, we’re proud to say that we provide the broadest set of best-in-class solutions to manage, protect and recover all data workloads, from SMB to enterprise and regardless of location or complexity. That covers a lot of ground. Watch for a future post where we’ll tour Arcserve products and solutions and show you how each amplifies the power of our Unified Data Resilience platform.

Since IT teams are typically burdened by daily demands to keep operations moving while supporting business innovation, expert help can go a long way toward becoming a genuinely resilient organization. 

Talking to an Arcserve technology partner is an excellent first step. They can help you assess your current security posture and data resilience capabilities and guide you to solutions that cost-effectively solve problems and secure your data. Find an Arcserve technology partner here.