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Multi-Tiered Data Recovery Prepares Healthcare Organizations Against Ransomware

ActiveScale

I can’t remember the last time I saw sporadic cyber-attacks on health organizations; seems like a very long time ago. Lately they’ve been relentless and merciless on the most vulnerable – health institutions. According to French government, since the beginning of the year, they’ve seen a health facility fall victim to a cyber-attack on a weekly basis. “The hospitals at Dax and Villefranche-sur-Saône were paralyzed by attacks in which hackers blocked the telephone systems, forcing the hospitals to shut off the internet service and other networks to keep the ransomware from spreading. This affected patient records, surgical devices, medication management, appointments, bed and doctor allocation,” reported Healthcare IT News, an authoritative source covering technology in healthcare. The French Government is finally cracking down on e-crime, responding with a one-billion-euro investment in a national cybersecurity strategy.

This story resonates all over the world, including the United States. As we see, the unwavering attacks continue to rise leaving many institutions crippled, unable to provide services that truly skirt a life-or-death scenario. With the appearance of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, this development presented new yet urgent challenges for the medical community.  

At Quantum, we are working hard to protect our cyber climate, and want to empower the healthcare industry with the knowledge and tools to protect and recover from ransomware and other malware. E-security methods will evolve, but today we need to employ technologies, such as machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), to provide the advanced security analytics needed to stay ahead of the criminals, and of course, mitigating risk takes multiple technologies. Not one single solution can achieve the protection needed for the assault healthcare organizations are experiencing.

Protect Network and Backup Infrastructure

While networks and production data must be protected, so does your backup infrastructure. Recent analysis of criminal tactics indicate that attackers are targeting critical systems but with a focus on backup first. Why? If they can disable your ability to recover, they’ve won the battle. With the ability to recover gone, what can you do? Institutions end up paying ransom, but this doesn’t solve the problem.

Solutions to Recover Data Across Any Point in the Data Lifecycle

Tools like the ability to isolate your backups via immutable storage or leveraging a physical airgap to create a barrier that protects and enables fast recovery are indispensable. As the data protection experts, Quantum has created solutions that can protect and recover your data across any point in your data’s lifecycle. We did this to help you maintain a cost-effective, multi-tiering solution that also provides you the ability to use just about any application you prefer. Let’s take a closer look:

A blended mix of technology that secures and isolates backups in different tiers, all kept in either a non-network addressable location or in an immutable state that simply unreachable by an intruder. Your institutional needs vary and so does your data. So, depending on performance, retention, scale, and risk level needs, we have a solution that focuses on each tier.

  • In the first tier where performance matters, data is backed up to shares where the DXi Backup Appliance system (per your schedule) takes snapshots that cannot be deleted or encrypted making backups (snapshots) immutable, which means backups can be managed to meet SLAs required RTOs and RPOs. This solution supports NAS, OST, VTL protocols.
  • In the large unstructured nearline storage tier, where medical imaging can be stored, retained, and made readily available, we support keyless encryption of data at rest to prevent access via unauthorized applications. The Object Lock feature in ActiveScale makes objects immutable; once set, immutability can’t be modified even by an administrator, making data safe from ransomware attacks. The system may be partitioned into buckets and different protection policies may be applied to align with the security requirements. This a simple and easy to use and architecture that is designed to scale seamlessly at an exabyte level for on-prem hybrid cloud data storage.
  • In a long-term retention tier, there is the simple, yet very effective physical barrier created by Scalar Tape Libraries that secure your data in an “active” vault in the library so that data is isolated, secured and readily available when you need it. This long-term storage tier that is highly recommended by CISA, FBI, and NCSK UK is the most cost-effective method to protect and recover from ransomware.

To learn more about how Quantum solutions can help you achieve solid ransomware protection and recovery, please contact a Quantum authorized reseller or reach out to us at www.quantum.com to help you connect with someone who can help you.

Source: Emmanuel Macron pledges €1bn for cybersecuri t y after hospital ransomware attacks | Healthcare IT News

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A Trifecta of Veeam-Ready Solutions

ActiveScale

They say the most interesting things in life come in sets of threes. Certainly, some sets are more interesting and simpler than others, such as live, love, laugh, or rock, paper, scissors, or my favorite, the good, the bad, and the ugly. While not super philosophical, they are easy concepts to remember and, in some cases, simplify our daily lives. When we think of things that we need to simplify in a data centric environment, we think of data management, data security, and data protection. Quantum has made a commitment to provide leading solutions that simplify; this is clearly apparent as we continue to work with Veeam offering solutions around data management, security, and protection. Quantum has been a long-standing partner of Veeam and has been certified as Veeam Ready, a program that ensures compliance with functionality and performance standards put forth by Veeam.

As the evolution of Big Data continues, the three core topics of concern to date are protect, secure, and manage data. The industry has done a decent job of providing data protection. Data Management is an emerging market segment focused on unstructured data. Recent hacking and ransomware attacks have brought concerns around data security to the forefront of people’s minds. Quantum has been a Veeam partner for a long time, since Veeam 9.5 Quantum DXi deduplication appliances and award-winning Scalar tape libraries have been certified with Veeam. Quantum’s most recent addition to the portfolio, Active Scale Object Storage , has also been Veeam Ready (v10) certified. Here is the full portfolio that is Veeam 10 Ready certified:

Veeam Integrated DXi Deduplication Appliance

DXi backup appliances offer cost-effective, fast backup and restores for mission-critical product data. Our customers love our DXi for many reasons, but feedback we often hear is that the DXi replication starts just after the first file is backed up without waiting for the end of the Veeam task, so the period of risk—the gap between when a backup is done and a copy is safely off site—is incredibly short, unlike some competitor’s solutions that start the replication only when the Veeam task is done. In v10, Fast Clone feature improves synthetic full performance by referencing existing data blocks on volumes instead of copying data blocks between files and copying those blocks only when files are modified. We have seen up to 15x improvement in our test labs and customer deployments in the speed and in some cases reduced the creation time from hours to minutes.

Veeam Ready Scalar Tape Library

Quantum Scalar tape solution for compliance, long-term retention requirement and ransomware protection. Quantum Scalar library is the only tape system in the market that uses Active Vault, a hands-off approach to managing media between an active and vaulted partition that is completely disconnected from the network. This enables our customers to fully airgap their data and thwart the effects of ransomware or other malware.

Veeam Ready Object Immutability – Active Scale Object Storage

ActiveScale is Quantum’s object storage system that provides a data-forever storage infrastructure. The ActiveScale system architecture accommodates storing primary copy of multi-petabyte-scale datasets that are highly durable and facilitates long-term data retention with minimal administrative overhead. With a Veeam Ready Object Immutability certification, Quantum solutions offer clients the ability to leverage our appliances efficiently through the Veeam GUI.

For more information on testing criteria or detailed information about how Quantum’s portfolio can help you achieve your data protection requirements, visit us our Quantum & Veeam web page or talk to one of our solution representatives.

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VirtualQ I Transform Recap: Helping you Unlock the Value of Unstructured Data

ActiveScale

As we head into the holiday season, it’s a good time to recap some of the major things we’ve introduced this year, and in many ways our recent VirtualQ I Transform event was the culmination of a years’ worth of effort in bringing new products and solutions to market. 

In November, our VirtualQ I Transform event focused on how unstructured data growth, and unlocking the business value in this data, is transforming how our customers think about data. This event was the culmination of our launch efforts of the expanded portfolio we announced on November 10 – focused on managing, storing, and protecting unstructured data across its lifecycle. You can access all of the sessions and watch at your convenience here .

Most Popular Topics During VirtualQ I Transform

Based on the hundreds of attendees across many different sessions hosted over two days (one European event, and one event for the Americas), here are some of the topics that resonated most and generated the most interest:

Unstructured Data Sprawl: Many of our customers are outgrowing their capacity and looking at new ways to manage ‘unstructured data sprawl.’  We are helping these customers gain better visibility into what data they have, where it lives, and automate ways to move data between edge, core, and cloud environments. The new automated data movement we’ve added to StorNext 7 and ATFS can help in this regard, and were two of the key things we introduced. 

ATFS Storage Platform: There were many questions about our new ATFS storage platform, an easy to use, cost effective NAS platform with integrated data classification. This data classification is a major advancement in giving customers visibility into the file data they are storing.  With simple queries, customers can gain new insights into the make-up of their file data, where it lives, and then quickly use those insights to drive actions that can be enforced with data placement policies, data protection policies, and storage quotas. 

ATFS Trial Download: As we mentioned during our event, for anyone interested in learning more about the ATFS platform, and to start to classify the file data you have today, download a full version of ATFS here . It only takes a few minutes, and you can start to see the impact this platform can make to your NAS infrastructure.

Ransomware Protection: There was also a lot of interest in new ways and best practices to protect against ransomware, and security of data in general. This continues to be top of mind for many of our customers, and we now have options to protect against ransomware regardless of your technology choice, and regardless of the application you are using. We’ve introduced Object Lock to our ActiveScale object store software , we are adding a similar snapshot retention lock feature to our DXi backup appliances , and tape remains the most secure storage with innate air-gapped protection, Active Vault software to automatically move tapes to an in-library vault, and security capabilities like AES-256-bit encryption and multi-factor authentication.

“Forever” Data Archives: Lastly, there was continued interest in the emerging realization that much of this valuable data being created and analyzed will need to be kept forever in a private cloud. Our solutions for this “forever” data archive continue to drive interest, from object storage software with erasure encoding, to RAIL tape, to ways to index and search the content in these archives. Look for some exciting announcements in this area in the coming weeks and months. You can check out the “Forever Archive” white paper here .

Looking Ahead

We are continuing to innovate and transform our own business with a focus on solving our customers’ most pressing business challenges in the areas of video, digital images, and other forms of unstructured data, and we can’t wait for 2021! 

Watch VirtualQ I Transform Sessions On-Demand

If you missed the event, watch replays at your own pace to learn more about managing, storing, and protecting unstructured data across its lifecycle.

Watch Sessions On-Demand Now!

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This Week at the Q

ActiveScale

Welcome to another entry of ‘This Week at the Q’ and our top 5 highlights.

  1. With our recently announced ActiveScaleTM Object Lock feature for data immutability, your data can be protected from malicious acts such as data deletion, relocation, and ransomware. We now have a new video explaining how this works – watch here !
active scale video grab

2. And for more advice to proactively combat the onslaught of ransomware attacks and the elements needed for a solid data protection plan, read more in this Security Magazine blog, “End the vicious ransomware cycle.”

3. Quantum will be at Tech Field Day on December 9th, from 8-10am PT! This event brings together a group of technical influencers and experts to explore the technical underpinnings and architectures of invited vendors. If you want to learn more about our ActiveScale object storage for private cloud, the event is live streamed and you can follow along live via Twitter @TechFieldDay or online during the time slots below:

tech field day logo 1
Time (PT) Section Speaker
8:00AM Quantum Company Overview Ed Fiore, General Manager
8:20AM ActiveScale Object Storage Intro Thomas Demoor, Lead Architect
9:00AM ActiveScale Layered Architecture  Thomas Demoor, Lead Architect
9:20 AM ActiveScale Product Summary Thomas Demoor, Lead Architect
9:30AM ActiveScale Product Demo Sherman Schorzman, Technical Marketing Engineer

4. We also recently launched our all-new All-Terrain File System, ATFS. Hear from early customer, The Hormel Institute, University of MN, about how they accelerated cancer research and improved ROI using ATFS’s zero-touch data classification and automated policies for data mobility. Read their case study here.

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5. And one more ATFS case study! The production experts at 5 guys named Moe had challenges ingesting multiple tapes (assume tape equals a movie or season episode) in parallel, tracking the progress of data through the workflow stages, and managing resources for productivity. Read their case study here to see how Quantum ATFS data insights and automation meet storage needs for productivity and profitability improvements.

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Leave a comment if there are topics you’d like to see added to our weekly top 5 happenings!

Natasha

To view our Partner blog, click here

Join us at Tech Field Day!

ActiveScale

Quantum is pleased to present at the upcoming Tech Field Day , held virtually on Dec 9th. 

Tech Field Day is an event unlike any other in the industry.  At each Tech Field Day, a group of technical influencers and experts, called delegates, participate with leading IT vendors to explore products and their technical underpinnings.  There are no sales pitches or marketing presentations at Tech Field Day events.  Instead, vendors provide a deep dive into their product architectures and give the delegates the opportunity to probe deeper via live questions which represent the perspectives of technical end users.  These events are open to anyone to watch live, and all the presentations are made public shortly after the event. 

At the next event, Quantum will share another significant step in our vision to lead in video and unstructured data solutions and represent a key shift in focus from ‘storing’ data to ‘managing’ data. This event is a great way to learn about Quantum’s underlying technology that differentiates ActiveScale from other products.

 Follow along live via twitter @TechFieldDay or online during the time slots below. 

Time (PT) Section Speaker
8:00AM Quantum Company Overview Ed Fiore, Primary Storage, General Manager
8:20AM Object Storage and ActiveScale Introduction Thomas Demoor, ActiveScale  Lead Architect
9:00AM ActiveScale Layered Architecture  Thomas Demoor, ActiveScale, Lead Architect
9:20 AM ActiveScale Product Summary Thomas Demoor, ActiveScale, Lead Architect
9:30AM ActiveScale – Product Demonstration Sherman Schorzman, ActiveScale Technical Marketing Engineer
tech field day logo

To view our Partner blog, click here

This Week at the Q

ActiveScale

Welcome to another entry of ‘This Week at the Q’ and our top 5 highlights. It’s been a busy week continuing the product announcements from our expanded portfolio!

1. Continuing on the news from last week’s launch of our new expanded portfolio – covered here in Blocks & Files – this week we announced more details around our next-gen StorNext® 7 high-performance file system and ActiveScaleTM object storage advancements.

sn gui

2. This new byline by Matt Dewey on “Managing Complex Object Stores” just published in Disaster Recovery Journal. Object stores have found a home in the cloud and in data centers, becoming the repository for long-lived and high-value data. Read more here to learn about use cases for object storage, its advantages in key markets, as well as some of the challenges it can present and what to consider.

activscale

3. We enjoyed connecting with the high-performance computing community this week at the virtual SC20 event. If we missed you, you can still check out this video interview we did with InsideHPC, “At Virtual SC20: Quantum Corp. Takes on High Performance Storage of Unstructured Data.”

sc20

4. Check out this new blog post, “Cyber Insurance Market is Evolving Due to Ransomware Demands.” You can learn how the cyber security insurance market is evolving amidst an increase in ransomware demands and payments. Insurance companies are starting to move the risk over to subscribers, requiring stricter controls. Read more here.

cyber insurance

5. One of the reasons I love working at Quantum is the culture and the people I get to work with every day, and it is most definitely an honor to work with Liz King! Get to know Quantum’s CRO a little more in this new Authority Magazine article, ”Women of the C-Suite: Liz King of Quantum.”

liz king 1

Leave a comment if there are topics you’d like to see added to our weekly top 5 happenings!

Natasha

To view our Partner blog, click here