Secure and Resilient Data Protection with NetBackup Flex 4.0

Modern enterprises cannot function without access to data making data security and availability not just technical but also business challenges. With the continuous increase in cyberattacks, data protection has become more important than ever. Veritas has a long history of delivering data protection solutions to enterprises. To further secure backup data and ensure data availability when a disaster strikes, the latest version of the Flex operating environment includes several new capabilities to better power our NetBackup Flex appliances such as security administrator role, multifactor authentication, and resilience for primary servers.

Multifactor Authentication

A password alone is no longer sufficient to properly secure user account access. According to statista.com an eight-character complex password can be cracked in about eight hours. Multifactor authentication (MFA) provides the method to enforce the second authentication factor (evidence) required for login. The MFA implementation on Flex appliances utilizes a time-based one-time passcode and it does not require additional hardware and Internet access. Furthermore, multifactor authentication can be configured for use with the appliance Web UI, appliance shell, NetBackup shell, NetBackup Web UI and WORM shell to better secure access to your entire data protection environment.

Security Administrator Role

The new security administrator role is used to control overall security aspects and configuration by allowing users other than admin (super administrator role) to manage appliance and user accounts. Additionally, a user account with this role is required when multifactor authentication is configured or enforced. The existence of user with the security administrator role provides a method of resetting multifactor authentication for other users who have lost the means to generate the passcode required for successful appliance login.

Primary Server Resilience

Disaster recovery for the compute environment means that selected services can be quickly restored at an alternate location after a catastrophic event. Flex operating environment now supports NetBackup primary server replication between any two Flex appliances. The primary server may be quickly activated on the surviving site or the surviving appliance on the same site, to resume data protection services. Resilience for primary servers also provides an easy means for replication role changing between appliances where the target primary server becomes the replication source. This functionality allows for less disruptive appliance maintenance, platform updates, migrations, disaster recovery related tests and emergency preparedness exercises.

Additional Enhancements

Flex 4.0 adds simplified appliance IP address reconfiguration using single command and Web UI based log data masking option.

The latest security and vulnerability fixes are included and just like the previous Flex release, the single step update from version 2.1 or higher is supported.

Conclusion

These new features and enhancements to the Flex operating environment mean better data protection, increased security, higher availability, and improved appliance management. Simply update your data protection infrastructure to Flex 4.0 by downloading it from here. For more information on how Veritas can help with data protection challenges explore our family of backup appliances today.