Ransomware protection, security, and resiliency for business-critical applications

Are you concerned about ransomware? Are you looking for a proven solution to protect your business-critical IT services against malware and other events that may lead to unplanned downtime? Malware infiltration has become a significant issue affecting businesses everywhere. Being able to quickly recover from outages and get back online fast is key, regardless of whether the outage is the result of a malware-related event or something else. Veritas InfoScale is designed to help you do this, and it also gives you the architectural flexibility you need to run your business-critical applications anywhere. 

In addition to comprehensive functionality that provides high availability and disaster recovery for business-critical applications, InfoScale now has several integrated security features that are key parts of a multi-layered security strategy that can help ensure your business-critical applications are protected from malware and are easily recoverable from any kind of disruption. InfoScale provides important functionality to augment your IT security and resiliency strategy:

• SecureFS – provides data immutability with automatically created WORM checkpoints to reduce the impact of ransomware attacks 

• Encryption – volume encryption for Linux and Windows systems ensures that your data is secure and protected from unauthorized access and exfiltration

• Data isolation – create secure copies of your application data in an area isolated from traffic and potential malware threats – where data can be quickly recovered when needed

• Application resiliency – proven HADR orchestration and replication features work in parallel with security functionality to give you an advanced application resiliency solution that protects you against any type of outage

With all these features available as a single solution, InfoScale is a proven enterprise platform for running your business-critical applications with confidence. Let’s take a look at how it works.

Ransomware Resiliency

Malware is unfortunately one of the main causes of unplanned downtime. Ransomware attacks are becoming commonplace, and it’s more important than ever to have a multi-layered strategy in place to protect your business-critical applications. In addition to application high availability and resiliency, InfoScale is designed to protect enterprise workloads by providing security features such as data immutability, encryption, and data isolation for your applications without compromising performance and usability. Figure 1 will give you a quick view of what this looks like.

Figure 1: InfoScale includes key functionality needed to implement an effective multi-layered cyber security strategy

InfoScale’s secure file system checkpoints work seamlessly with your applications. Immutable checkpoints are a quick, space-efficient, and easy-to-use solution for protecting your primary data against ransomware attacks. Checkpoints can be very quickly restored (storage rollback) which significantly reduces restore times compared to a traditional recovery from a backup image. InfoScale’s data isolation functionality helps reduce the attack vector by isolating application data snapshots from traffic, while still providing a fast and simple way to recover them when needed. InfoScale also includes FIPS compliant volume encryption which can be enabled automatically to reduce the risk of data exposure due to unauthorized access and exfiltration.  

If you’re using a malware scanning solution, this provides another layer of security for InfoScale-managed systems and helps ensure that your environment is clean and malware free using the most up-to-date malware signatures.

Data corruption is another factor that may lead to unplanned downtime, and having an optimized recovery strategy to protect against data corruption is just as important as ransomware protection.  Luckily, InfoScale makes it easy to protect your applications against both data corruption and ransomware in parallel (shown in Figure 2).

Figure 2 InfoScale enables you to easily configure optimized snapshots and ransomware protection for your applications

Some other very important features InfoScale provides to help ensure security and resiliency within your environment: 

• Secure boot – keys are provided by Veritas and are used as part of the UEFI boot process to validate that the InfoScale modules are secure and trusted

• Secure clock – ensures that ransomware cannot modify retention periods on immutable storage by manipulating the system clock

Figure 3 InfoScale supports the secure boot process on UEFI systems

Application Resiliency

Fully protecting your applications against unplanned downtime means that you also need to protect your applications against other forms of outages such as natural disasters and system failures. With InfoScale, you can implement advanced HADR topologies for your applications in parallel with InfoScale’s security and ransomware protection features – a unique solution that delivers enterprise-grade protection and resiliency to help eliminate unplanned application downtime. Figure 4 is an example of how you can use InfoScale to implement an HADR strategy with a near-zero RPO and RTO.

Figure 4 InfoScale’s advanced resiliency and disaster recovery management works in parallel with ransomware protection

Summary

With new security concerns arising every day, having a multi-layered cybersecurity strategy is more important than ever. InfoScale is a multi-faceted and comprehensive solution that delivers an advanced layer of security and application resiliency for business-critical applications. This helps keep your applications online and protected from malware – so you can run your business technology with confidence.

For more information on how InfoScale provides ransomware protection, security, and application resiliency, check out this solution paper. Check out this quick demo of InfoScale’s ransomware resiliency functionality.