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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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Cyber Insurance Market is Evolving Due to Ransomware Demands

CMMA Blog

The cyber security insurance market is evolving amidst an increase in ransomware demands and payments. Insurance companies have been taking on unmitigated risk, but as we begin to better understand the threats, insurers are moving the risk over to the subscribers, requiring stricter controls.  

Cyber Security Insurance Companies Requiring Stricter Controls

Cyber security insurance companies are changing their approach in dealing with ransomware. ZDNet claims that ransomware accounted for 41% of all cyber insurance claims in the first half of 2020 with claims ranging in size from $1,000 to over $2 million per ransomware incident. Out of all the cyberattacks in 2019, the attacks from the malicious malware known as ransomware have increased to 62% up from 56% the previous year. Latest studies indicate there is one attack every 39 seconds with demands for payments increasing year-over-year and at a high volume especially since RaaS (ransomware-as-a-service) adopted big-game hunting tactics (BGH = targeting enterprises). Whether a small business or a large enterprise, attackers have had an 80% rate of success. These statistics are alarming to the insurance industry and they should be.

Today, cyber insurers have not had strict requirements to underwrite a policy. This is very different from, let’s say, insuring an office building or your home from fire. It is best practice to have fire insurance, but to get coverage, the building owner/managers need to mitigate fire risk and install a sprinkler system. If they don’t, the insurer will demand the system be installed to accept the risk and provide the coverage needed. Similarly, cyber insurance brokers are further examining the risks they take and are beginning to push additional control measures to help mitigate ransomware risk. Underwriters are catching up with the myriad of changes happening in the data center and just like the security professional, they too are at a critical moment as this landscape evolves. “The cyber insurance market has rallied around the need for more sophisticated ways to mitigate ransomware,” said Mr. Maher, North America Cyber, AXIS Insurance (Insurancebusinessmag.com/us/ib-talk ).

What does all this mean for the IT professional?

Cyber insurers see the value of claims rise because of malicious attacks, especially because of RaaS, and are seeking to impose changes, such as a set of minimum standards, to underwrite cyber insurance. If you don’t have the minimum to meet their required control, they won’t grant the policy until you have. Accordingly, to mitigate effectively, the following standards are being proposed as a good start:

blog table

This list is not exhaustive; cyber security best practices recommend implementing anti-virus protection and encryption as techniques to enable controls. Check out the cybersecurity & infrastructure security agency for ransomware guidelines CISA.GOV for a complete list.

Savvy Security Professionals Keep Copies of Data Offline and Offsite

Some of these standards are in addition to what is a customary approach to data protection and network security. Based on forensic data available, we know that more network and backup controls are necessary, because criminals are penetrating networks going undetected for many days, even months using sophisticated methods that could be resolved using known security techniques. It’s not a straightforward formula for insurers either. They also have OFAC requirements and advisory that must be met and depending on who the threat actor is or what country they’re operating from, they may exclude coverage. This is bad news for the insured and is more reason to understand why savvy security professionals keep copies of data off-line and off-site and understand that mitigating ransomware risk requires more than buying a cyber insurance policy. How can brokers and cyber insurance underwriters help stop this vicious cycle? Demanding stricter guidelines for coverage.

Quantum Solutions Help Organizations Mitigate Ransomware Risk

Quantum offers solutions to help you mitigate the risk of ransomware. You can rely on our ActiveScale object storage platform to secure data in flight and at rest with encryption and to further protect data against ransomware with Object Lock capability. Object Lock policy for retention and immutability, once set, can’t be modified, even with administrative permissions. 

Our Scalar tape libraries with Active Vault technology protects data against ransomware true air-gap protection and multi-factor authentication. The tape library with Active Vault creates an offline partition with an automated robot moving tape cartridges from a network connected partition to a vault partition. Quantum’s solutions have been designed to help organizations mitigate ransomware risk and comply with new cyber insurers’ demands. With that in mind, Quantum created simple and complete Ransomware Protection Packages that include all the security features needed to air-gap and securely vault your data, making your backups and long-term storage immutable. Check out our Ransomware Protection Packages here .  

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The Best Ransomware Protection Comes With Physical Layers

Archive Storage

For every ransomware attack we see in the news, there are hundreds of others that don’t get reported. Strains and cyber criminals have become increasingly insidious in their attempts to penetrate networks and take control of all digital assets, including backups. With a successful attack comes downtime, millions of dollars in revenue losses, and damaged reputation. Every time an organization pays for ransomware, more demand is created making recovery more complicated and time consuming.  Quantum has designed a solution to protect organizations against ransomware and enable fast recovery.

Like many others who have fallen victim to ransomware, they experienced many of the most common consequences, such as:

  • Loss of revenue, clients and trust
  • Damaged Reputation and Shaming
  • Paid large sums to attackers and incurred costs of recovery
  • Threat of data and privacy breach
  • Exposing clients and partners to ransomware threats as well as sensitive information that may lead to blackmail, loss of credibility, and compromised positions in society and market
  • Recovery may take a lot time, thus interrupting business and affecting operations for months and potentially years.

Bad actors are getting more invested in data theft and shaming tactics, including engaging in partnerships to produce larger more effective ransomware campaigns against your network and backup environments. The whole scheme is to eclipse any ability to recover and thus, payout the ransom. This means that you have the duty to understand the implications and to defend your network by eliminating their strength, which is the ability to spread a virus through network connected devices. However, if you only rely on your cyber security software or your cyber insurance policy to pay ransom, then you are leaving a big gap in your ransomware protection strategy.

Why not make tape’s offline copy part of your insurance policy? Today, disk is the de facto for ransomware recovery efforts, but it has several disadvantages, here are four:

  1. Backups will always remain online – high chance it will get compromised
  2. Expensive once you add up soft costs
  3. Disk solutions are not designed to protect backups against ransomware
  4. Network connected copies are always at risk; they are a bullseye for hackers

Disk is designed to be efficient, reduce footprint and meet your SLA requirements; For protection against ransomware, disk lacks the ability to truly airgap, so it remains vulnerable and accessible for criminals to encrypt, steal, and use it to your organization’s detriment. Cloud storage on the other hand, can be used as an offline service or “cold storage” but it comes with limitations:

  • No control of your data
  • Egress charges if you need access
  • Recovering from cloud can take weeks or months

It’s long past time for organization to have a true ransomware protection plan that includes an offline copy readily available on prem or in the cloud as part of an insurance policy.

Why Quantum and disk + tape (online and offline copies): Backup appliances like the DXi ® are purpose built appliances essential to meet your RPOs and RTOs, not only do you get ultra-fast performance and security with hardware based encryption technology, you also maximize savings with its ultra-dense drives to help you reduce footprint.  DXi also has a fine-tuned replication engine that enables multi-site DR protection. This means, that as soon as your data hits the DXi, it immediately begins to replicate data offsite and then to tape. Many customers do not want to wait to airgap tape. As soon as its done writing, they want to airgap it.

The complexity around tape is well known and Quantum’s Active Vault technology resolves those issues. It provides a solid and secure airgap for ransomware protection. Here are some of the benefits:

  • Offers True air-gap ransomware protection with offline in-library vault for onsite backups.
  • Archive, on-site, long-term vaulting, replaces external shelf storage
  • Backup, short-term vault prior to sending offsite
  • Removes the need of handling tapes
  • No network, host, or drive connectivity; Only admin account has visibility and access via multi-factor authentication (MFA)
  • Use of unlicensed slots make active vault very economical
  • Reliable and secure enhancements you can combine: Encryption AES 256-bit, WORM and MFA

Scalar libraries with its offline capabilities and active vault are the most secure, automated libraries in the market for ransomware protection; A virus cannot bypass a physical barrier formed between your data and the network. With a relatively low investment, the ransomware protection you get with the active vault feature is unmatched. No other provider has this level of security and automatization in their libraries. When a ransomware attack bypasses your security endpoints, chances are high your online copies will get compromised. This is where the offline copy can be your best last line of defense and your insurance policy. As you evaluate ransomware data protection strategies, think about the losses associated with a successful attack to your organization…Revenue, clients, reputation, etc.

Consider adding offline storage with active vault as an additional security layer for ransomware protection – It is the most cost-effective alternate solution to expensive disk or paying ransom that by the way, funds the criminal market that you are also protecting your data from.

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Quantum and Veeam V10: A Perspective from VeeamON 2020

Archive

In the last few weeks, we’ve had the opportunity to co-present with our partner Veeam at Quantum’s VirtualQ I Protect & Archive event, and also engage with Veeam customers at the recent VeeamON 2020 show. And even with so much focus on enabling remote work, enabling hybrid- and multi-cloud infrastructures, and all the new features in Veeam V10, we continue to see interest and engagement when it comes to these topics:

1.  Ransomware protection and 3-2-1-1 data protection practice

A long-time best practice more relevant today than ever, the 3-2-1-1 rule specifies three copies of your data, stored on two different types of media, where one copy is offsite, and one is offline, air-gapped, or immutable. There are a couple of new twists to this rule that we’ve been emphasizing:

  • The first is that the ‘offsite’ copy is increasingly in the cloud. Cloud services from AWS, Azure, and others are growing like crazy, and Veeam and other backup applications can now easily make an offsite copy to the cloud. This can replace recovering tapes from a vault in many cases, which can take a long time and is difficult. However, in this paradigm, tape still plays a role – as an on-premise “offline” copy of your data. Veeam and Quantum continue to advocate keeping a copy on tape, and with the Active Vault feature that Quantum introduced earlier this year as part of our Ransomware Protection Packages , administrators can store backup copies in a totally secure, offline environment without ever handling tapes.
  • The second nuance is this notion of an ‘immutable’ copy of data. LTO tape has had Write Once Read Many (“WORM”) functionality for many years, and combined with its inherent offline nature, AES-256-bit encryption, and it’s low cost and low power, tape is an ideal immutable data vault. But our customers are also looking to use object storage for long-term storage for compliance, and that’s why we are in the process of certifying our ActiveScale object storage system to be Veeam Ready. We expect to make that announcement in July.

2.  It’s all about availability of your production systems and applications

Even with all the new features and many different backup and protection technologies being employed, at the end-of-the-day, it is about maximizing the availability of your production environment. Even protecting applications that run in the cloud. And with Veeam V10 and Quantum DXi (a Veeam Integrated backup repository), we continue to improve performance so our customers can maximize availability with faster backups and restores.  One new feature in Veeam V10 is called Fast Clone, or Block Clone, and the latest version of Quantum DXi software can leverage this feature to dramatically speed up synthetic full backup performance.  Creating a synthetic full backup that use to take hours now can be completed in minutes, and we’ve reduced the strain on the network and Veeam backup infrastructure dramatically. This latest enhancement builds on the Veeam Data Mover Service (VDMS) integration that DXi has had for several years and makes DXi the clear best choice for a Veeam backup repository.

Achieving 3-2-1-1 Data Protection

And now that Quantum can bring together Veeam Integrated backup repositories with DXi, a soon-to-be-Veeam-Ready object store in ActiveScale, and industry-leading tape storage with unique Active Vault software, we are in a truly unique position to deliver infrastructures to Veeam customers, so they can achieve 3-2-1-1 data protection.

See these related resources for more information about Quantum & Veeam solutions:

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Data Protection and Archive Strategies at Your Fingertips

Archive

We had a great turn out last week to our VirtualQ I Protect & Archive event of online sessions where we had an opportunity to discuss some of the latest data trends, challenges, strategies, and tactics needed for processing, storing, and protecting massive volumes of critical enterprise data, which continues to grow even as we are all working remotely. We want to thank our end users, partner community, and attendees for joining us. We thoroughly enjoyed sharing these important and relevant topics and look forward to bringing you more pressing topics again as we evolve and show you how Quantum is innovating.

vqpa blog sessions

How are You Preparing for Massive Data Growth?
Data has not stopped its progression towards those massive growth numbers as predicted by IDC market research, which indicates that about 80% of the world’s data will be unstructured by 2025. We began with our CEO, Jamie Lerner, whose Welcome Keynote set the tone by level setting on where he sees Quantum playing an important role in this unstructured world and how we are currently addressing those challenges head on with object storage . Some of the most pressing topics we discussed was how to prepare for a future where 80% of data is unstructured now so that your organization is not caught unprepared?

How Do You Backup Petabytes of Data? Answer: You Don’t
Another interesting topic had to do with questions that are coming up more and more in our data-driven world is how do you backup petabytes of files? If you didn’t already know the answer to that, it’s you don’t. It was a very interesting concept and highly encourage to check out what our experts are talking about in the context of petabyte/exabyte scenarios.

Reducing Backup Footprint and Spend
In the enterprise backup and archive realm we want to help you meet and exceed your SLAs, so we centered the discussion around Quantum’s high-performance purposely built backup appliances – DXi9000 and DXi4800 – the most dense PBBA out in the market today. With this solution, we’ve been able to help our customers reduce their footprint and spend by consolidating many PBBA’s into a single 10U rackspace totaling 1PB of capacity! When you’re thinking about consolidating without sacrificing performance, Quantum DXi9000 could be the answer you’ve been looking for.

Solving Data Protection Challenges with Veeam and WekaIO
Finally, we invited our partners WekaIO and Veeam to share with us some reference architectures for machine learning at scale and, of course, the ever-important best practice backup rule of 3-2-1-1 . With Veeam, we dove into the backup rule, that is nevertheless so important to protect your data against ransomware . The role of object store in today’s enterprise environments is on everyone’s mind and these open discussions are the best way to learn how you can evaluate and leverage this cool technology and see if it’s the right fit for your growing data needs.

Finally, we shared how to build archive storage at exabyte scale and found a surprising twist to this story and a very interesting topic of discussion among our attendees. With the ever-increasing amounts of data growth in video and video-like data, and all these other topics mentioned, surely there is a session that you will find very interesting, so be sure to check them out.

Watch Session Recordings on Demand
If you missed our VirtualQ I Protect & Archive event, we’ve made all the sessions available for you to watch on demand. Watch recordings now.

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A Silver Lining of Innovation

Archive

It is been a long time coming. Two full days of sessions with our valued customers and those interested in our solutions. We’re excited to be hosting VirtualQ I Protect & Archive , a virtual event featuring live keynotes, educational sessions, and technology demonstrations, from June 9-10, 2020. Over the course of two days, we will present on the latest data protection and business continuity developments, as well as host virtual sessions featuring subject-matter experts and technology partners, including Veeam and WekaIO and we hope you can join us!

During this time, you can plan to learn about protecting and preserving your most critical data including:

  • Preparing for a future where 80% of data is unstructured
  • Best practices for backing up and managing immense amounts of data
  • Machine learning at scale (with WekaIO)
  • The role of object storage within Enterprise IT
  • Tactics to protect data from ransomware and cyber threats
  • The latest innovations to come from Quantum’s partnership with Veeam

With all these relevant topics, even during a pandemic like the one we are living through right now, data keeps growing. And there is no better way to face the future where 80% of data is unstructured than preparing for it. Though we stopped going to the office, we have not stopped creating data and, even more so, now that we are working remotely, these end points are creating data at immense speeds and in more ways than one. What is the silver lining in all this? It is driving our engineers to create new technology and enhancing our solutions to perform and deliver on our customer’s needs. The more we are pressed, the more innovation is squeezed out to improve our solutions and services. We are excited to share the latest with you during these sessions.

So, what is Quantum doing to help you? We are innovating. We are adding advanced features that will enable you to securely protect and archive your data cost-effectively whether you chose disk, tape, or object storage. We are driving with performance. Have you checked out the latest performance numbers on our flagship DXi backup appliance? We are also integrating tightly with our technology partners such as WekaIO and Veeam to meet or exceed your service level agreements (SLA’s). The discussion around object store is always an interesting one as organizations are still learning to navigate the murky waters of the cloud, given some of those hidden fees, security hazards, and how it is really meant to be used so that it doesn’t break the bank. Finally, we will discuss the latest ransomware tactics leveraged by criminals and why they are after your backup infrastructure. This and much more, and we hope you can join us.

Register Now. You can register for our virtual sessions at VirtualQ I Protect & Archive .

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