To expand on last week's topic of cyber resilience and bring this series to a close, I'd like to leave you with some final thoughts on how IBM Flash Storage and LRS expertise can make your computing environment safer and more reliable.
Like any modern IT environment, your organization almost certainly has a cyber security plan. But do you have a cyber resilience plan? If you’re like most, you might think that resilience is about disaster recovery, backup or cyber security… but that is not entirely true. Cyber security is about keeping the bad guys out. But turn on the news tonight and you’ll see one or more high-profile victims of cyber-crime scrambling to recover despite the best intentions of their cyber security plan. Disaster Recovery is about duplicating the on-prem software and hardware to provide a recovery site in case of a geographical disaster. Backups? They are a state to recover from when something bad goes wrong, such as cyber activity. But do you know the number one target of cyber criminals today? The backups! Once criminals encrypt the backups, they will begin to encrypt the on-prem data at the same time they are contacting your organization to pay the ransom. Wonder why organizations pay the ransom? They have nothing to recover from if the backups are encrypted. How do your RPO and RTO parameters look now?
The good news is that LRS has a remedy built around the industry leading IBM Cyber Resilience solution using IBM Flash Systems and our award-winning Ransomware Threat Detection. Imagine if your organization could screen EVERY single I/O, literally as it’s being written, to determine possible cyber anomalies as they happen! What would this mean to your business? Faster anomaly detection, which means less data corruption and faster recovery, in seconds to minutes.
On top of that, the IBM Flash Systems provide on-array immutable copies for recovery. Not offline, or on a remote or slower device. On-array immutable copies mean the fastest possible recovery time of data when required. As such, IBM identifies data corruption information more quickly and allows for a quicker recovery of your data from previously made immutable copies. But this is not enough by itself. Even immutable copies can be useless if created with tainted data. If you do not interrogate your immutable copies as a regular part of creating them, you are rolling the dice when it comes to being able recover from them.
Let’s investigate this topic further.
When was the last time your data was tested and validated at your remote site to ensure that you can safely recover from it? Can you, or should you, try to recover from data that may be tainted? No, of course not. However, the average Inc. 500 company only tests and validates every 9-12 months. Over 30% of small businesses have never tested. This means you cannot and should not recover until the data has been put through the initial testing and validation testing, which could take days, if not weeks. What about the bandwidth from the remote site? The average organization can only move about 10TB in a 24-hour period. So, if you have 200TB of data, that means a 20-day recovery (and this is only after you factor in the time to test and validate the data). Can your organization afford to be down the worldwide average of 23 days before full recovery?
How can you tell if you are prepared for resiliency? LRS can provide you a free assessment on your resilience posture. No software loads, no in-depth timeframe involved. The LRS Cyber Resilience Assessment will be the best two hours your organization could spend to potentially save not just your data, but your precious time…. and possibly your business.
Cyber Resiliency is not easy. It’s hardware, software, and process, all coordinated to solve a complex problem. Like any complex challenge, understanding the problem is the beginning of any real solution. I hope that this six-part series has helped you better understand not just the risks and challenges, but the cost savings and other benefits made possible by IBM Flash Storage hardware and the LRS experts that help you optimize its use.
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