¶ INTRODUCTION TO INFINIVAULT
Data has become a new global currency. As with other currencies, it has also become a target for threats from those who wish to exploit its value. Ransomware is the new threat to data and it’s wreaking havoc on businesses of all sizes around the world.
Until recently, if you ask an IT organization to describe typical causes for service outages they would most likely mention network failures, power failures, hardware failures, user error, etc. In today’s world, we can add ransomware to that list.
Ransomware attackers (aka. threat actors) work to infiltrate an organization’s network. Once the network has been penetrated, one of the first orders of business is to access and destroy the backup data and any ability to recover. The next step is to encrypt the victim’s live production data. Once the encryption is enabled, the data is literally cut off from the IT systems and applications which access the data. The result is a devastating IT systems crash resulting in an outage for your business.
Typically what follows is some form of communication from the attacker indicating they have seized your data and if payment is not received within a certain period of time, the data will be permanently deleted. Unfortunately, statistics show that even once the ransom is paid, organizations have a 50/50 chance of actually receiving the keys to unlock the data.
Even in the best case scenario where the attacker provides the keys to decrypt the data, the time it will take to decrypt is usually significant. Then once the data is finally decrypted, the organization can begin the recovery process. This entire experience won’t be just painful, it will be your organization’s worst nightmare.
Traditional methods of combating ransomware have generally involved various forms of firewalling, monitoring and detection. While certainly necessary, these only provide partial protection against what some experts in the industry view as an inevitability given enough time. To make matters worse, the security framework must also be built to protect the organization from its own employees (aka. insider threat). Considering all of these elements, coupled with the ever increasing complexity of today’s modern IT infrastructures, it’s no wonder why we read about security breaches on a daily basis.
The industry needs a definitive approach to safeguarding the most important asset in the data center, which is the data itself. This is precisely what InfiniVault was designed to safeguard.
¶ INFINIVAULT: ENTERPRISE DATA PROTECTION AND BACKUP
InfiniVault is a highly-secure, software-based data protection appliance. It leverages any public cloud provider or local storage resource to distribute and store data under its protection. As data is written to the vault, it goes through a series of processes which ensure data survivability, integrity, security and true immutability. All of these processes are crucial, but immutability through a mechanism called Data Cloaking, is the most significant in preventing the impact of ransomware.
The vault security is of utmost importance which is why only well established data transfer protocols are made accessible to the customer network. Additionally, if the customer has to recover from a data loss event (regardless of reason), the customer is only granted access to the recovered data once multiple levels of authentication are performed by SteelDome security engineers.
The vault requires no configuration or management from the customer and is delivered fully operational and secure immediately ready for use within their infrastructure. It has been designed from the ground up to be as simple as possible to use while highly effective at securing data and defeating the severe impacts of ransomware.
¶ DATA PROTECTION VS. BACKUP
It is important to define the differences between data protection and backup, which are in our opinion are two ends of the same spectrum. InfiniVault leverages both to safeguard customer data no matter where it is located.
Within the context of the InfiniVault, data protection is a passive method of storing data with the vault. For example, the vault can be accessed via common infrastructure protocols such as SMB, NFS, etc. These protocols simply present a storage endpoint by which any operating system or application regardless of type or version can deposit data on the vault. The advantages are that these protocols are well understood, very likely already present on the network and avoid compatibility concerns as they can work with any operating system or application.
Within the context of the InfiniVault, backup is an active method of storing data with the vault. For example, within the vault there is a backup engine. This backup engine is a service which accepts connections from InfiniVault backup agents running anywhere in the world. The agents are responsible for collecting the data, packaging the data, and sending the data to the backup engine efficiently and securely. The advantages are that the agents can protect any data set anywhere in the world over any network, however are specifically limited to protecting Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems and the data contained within.
¶ INFINIVAULT ARCHITECTURE
The InfiniVault is designed to be as simple and non-intrusive as possible while providing robust data protection capabilities.
The vault allows connection over a many different access methods, including:
- File Sharing Protocols: SMB v3 and NFSv4
- Block Protocols: iSCSI and NVMeoF-RDMA
- Object Protocol: Amazon-compliant S3
- Web Protocol: Drag-n-drop web interface
- API Protocols: Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, Google Cloud and 30+ other platforms
