Why You Need Immutable Network Attached Storage for Ransomware Recovery

Mordor Intelligence estimates that more than 80 percent of midmarket and enterprise organizations are using network-attached storage (NAS) today and predicts that the NAS market will grow at an impressive 19.5 percent CAGR between 2021 and 2026. Mordor also points out that the most significant factor driving this growth is the “explosion in unstructured data, increasing the footprint of scale-out NAS in enterprise IT systems.” We concur, only adding that this massive data growth also drives the need for scale-out backup storage.

Unfortunately, ransomware isn’t going anywhere either: Sophos’ The State of Ransomware 2022 report found that 66 percent of the respondent’s organizations were hit by ransomware in the last year, with 65 percent of the attacks resulting in data encryption. The Sophos report also found that backups are the number one method for restoring data, used by 73 percent of respondents whose data was encrypted.

But here’s where the numbers illustrate the problem: 46 percent of respondents said they paid the ransom to restore data. That leaves a 27 percent gap filled by organizations that had backups but still had to pay the ransom. And, once again, according to the report, even those who did pay could only restore 61 percent of their encrypted data.

Immutability Is the Answer

That brings us to the 3-2-1-1 backup strategy: keep three copies of your data—one primary and two backups—with two copies stored locally in two formats (network-attached storage, tape, or a local drive) and one copy stored offsite in the cloud or secure storage.

The last one in 3-2-1-1 stands for immutability. Arcserve OneXafe employs a file system based on an immutable object store, with every object written only once—it can never be altered or deleted. Any modifications you make to your file system result in new immutable objects being created.

OneXafe provides continuous data protection (CDP) by taking low-overhead snapshots—a view of your file system at the instant it is taken—every 90 seconds. These snapshots inherit immutability from the underlying objects, ensuring your backups can’t be hurt by ransomware. And if you ever need to, the snapshots let you go back to specific points in time and recover your entire file system in minutes.

The ransomware metrics we’ve shared above make a case for using OneXafe for immutable network-attached storage as a backup data target because availability and restorability are guaranteed. And OneXafe provides a logical air gap thanks to its immutable object store.  

Scalability Matters

Statista projects that the total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally will rocket to 180 zettabytes by 2025, attributing the rate of increase over previous projections to remote work and the societal changes driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. Your organization is probably generating more data than you might have foreseen, too. That makes scalability a key backup feature of your backup infrastructure.

OneXafe makes scaling easy by letting you seamlessly add one drive at a time or multiple nodes in a cluster. This scale-out approach means you don’t have to allocate extra storage for “what ifs,” as with traditional storage architectures. You simply add storage as you need it. And OneXafe cuts your overall storage requirements by offering deep data reduction that combines inline deduplication with compression, delivering storage space savings of as much as 90 percent and dedupe ratios up to 10:1.

Added Value for File Server Consolidation and Unstructured Data Store

OneXafe is also designed to meet your performance and manageability requirements for unstructured data. You can seamlessly create NFS or SMB shares to meet accessibility requirements with commonly used protocols. And OneXafe’s storage architecture lets you free up virtual server resources—including costly virtual storage infrastructure—so you can use these resources elsewhere. OneXafe also helps you eliminate NAS data silos by consolidating storage onto a scale-out appliance that grows with you while giving you extensive disaster recovery capabilities.

Find Out More

Request a demo for a deeper dive into what makes OneXafe tick. And for expert help with ensuring your data is protected from ransomware and any other threats, talk to an Arcserve technology partner.