In today’s world digital transformation has profoundly transformed every aspect of life. Be it mid or small enterprises they are not an exception of this digital transformation movement. The sheer volume of data that enterprises create, manipulate, and store is growing, and drives a greater need for data governance. In addition, computing environments are more complex than they once were, routinely spanning the public cloud, the enterprise data center, and numerous edge devices ranging from Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to robots and remote servers. This complexity creates an expanded attack surface that’s more challenging to monitor and secure. At the same time, consumer awareness of the importance of data privacy is on the rise. The business value of data has never been greater than it is today.
As per Palo Alto Networks - Unit 42’s Ransomware Threat Report 2022, Ransomware operators post snippets of stolen information on Dark Web leak sites to intimidate victims into paying ransoms. To gain insight into behavior of ransomware groups and their impact on targets in the Asia Pacific region Unit 42 analyzed postings on those sites during 2021 by geography, threat actor and industry.
The key to applying an effective data security strategy is adopting a risk-based approach to protecting data across the entire enterprise. Securing cloud-based infrastructures requires a different approach than the traditional model of situating defences at the network’s perimeter. It demands comprehensive cloud data discovery and classification tools, plus ongoing activity monitoring and risk management. The use of personal computers, tablets, and mobile devices in enterprise computing environments is on the rise despite security leaders’ well-founded concerns about the risks that this practice can pose.
According to security experts, by using anti-ransomware, users can avoid a situation in which they have to pay horrendous sums for the possible release of their data. Ransomware infections can occur in various ways, such as through insecure and fraudulent websites, software downloads and by spam mail. Ransomware targets individuals as well as companies of all sizes. Security leaders have commented on various ways to secure data, protection against ransomware or to prevent an infection.
Let’s find out what the security leaders have in stock for us:
Dell Technologies’ enterprise backup solutions protecting everything from endpoints to edge
Importance of backup solutions: Dell Technologies’ backup solutions are designed with a prevention-first strategy which can tackle the growth in volume of data through easy-to-use intelligent solutions for data archival, data replication, disaster management, cyber recovery and other data recovery needs.
Our backup solutions improve uptime, prevent data loss and corruption, and are easy to deploy. With the intention to secure mission-critical data from edge to core to cloud, Dell Technologies’ backup and recovery services include applications and software which enable a full continuum of data protection strategies. Right from replication to snapshot to backup and archive, businesses of all scale and size remain insured against data loss with our comprehensive data backup portfolio.
The key features of backup solutions: Dell Technologies’ industry-leading backup and recovery solutions are able to protect data across all environments with a comprehensive portfolio of backup solutions, which include snapshot, replication, disaster recovery, cyber recovery, backup and archival of data. The aim is to protect business-critical data while reducing cost and the complexities associated with data management through easy-to-use tools, centralized management, analysis and reporting.
To help in securing data: As a global leader in data protection solutions, Dell Technologies’ enterprise backup solutions can protect everything from endpoints to edge to the largest enterprise data center, alongside on-prem infrastructure, and cloud. Dell Technologies makes it easy to implement powerful tools for backup, recovery, data archiving and data replication that can help to protect business-critical data, improve uptime and ensure data availability. Dell Technologies’ new SaaS-based Apex Backup Services offer end-to-end scalable, secure data protection with centralized monitoring and management for SaaS applications, endpoints and hybrid workloads.
Ripu Bajwa, Director and General Manager, Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies India
Data backup is essential to protect data from any kind of cyberattacks
Importance of backup solutions: Data is everything in today’s modern business. Data backup is essential to protect it from any kind of accident, cyberattack or natural disaster. In the event of a cyberattack, organizations can boot a saved backup and restore the data to its previous state. Backup solutions are important for companies as data loss can lead to massive damage, disrupt business and erode brand identity. Organizations can choose from a variety of backup solutions such as external hard drives, USB flash drives, optical media, cloud storage, online backup service and network-attached storage device available in the market based on their needs.
The key features of backup solutions: We don’t have backup solutions as we have everything on cloud. We use Google Cloud and AWS backup solutions. We also use Cohesity backup and recovery solutions that offer a unified backup and recovery for on-premises, cloud, and SaaS workloads while making hybrid cloud simple and secure.
To help in securing data: As enterprises are moving towards digital transformation, the urgency of a business data backup strategy continues to grow rapidly in India. It takes businesses many years to collect essential data and the last thing you will want is to lose your valuable data to external or internal threats. If enterprises are not experts in data protection and secure storage, we suggest they work with a team of professionals to ensure all their bases are covered and the data is as secure as possible. Our vendor-neutral partnership with leading enterprises in the cybersecurity sector ensures that we only offer products and services that comply with industry standards. We continue to offer support to our customers after they purchase our products to address their issues and update their services as per industry trends.
Sushil Goyal, Co-Founder & COO, Rahi
A data recovery program set up is needed prior to an attack
Importance of backup solutions: Attempted attacks and data breaches are inevitable, and no organization wants to be forced to decide between paying a ransom payment or settlement and losing important data. Your organization should be able to perform backups of all your systems and data and store it off the network. These backups should also be tested to ensure you can properly recover.
The key features of backup solutions: To successfully recover data, your organization needs to have had a data recovery program set up prior to an attack. If backups are scheduled for several times a day, a ransomware attack might only cost your organization a few hours.Whether you use cloud services or on-premises hardware to make copies of your data, it doesn’t matter. You just need to be able to access the backup files from an unaffected device.
To help in securing data: If the growth of ransomware attacks in 2022 indicates what the future holds, security teams everywhere should expect to see this attack vector become even more popular in 2023. In just the first half of 2022, the number of new ransomware variants we identified increased by nearly 100% compared to the previous six-month period, with our FortiGuard Labs team documenting 10,666 new ransomware variants in 1H 2022 compared to just 5,400 in 2H 2021. This explosive growth in new ransomware variants is primarily thanks to more attackers taking advantage of Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) subscriptions on the dark web.
Vishak Raman, Vice President of Sales, India, SAARC and Southeast Asia, Fortinet
To offer a comprehensive solution for secure and reliable data backup, leveraging both traditional and modern backup solutions
Importance of backup solutions: Our organization supports a variety of backup solutions to ensure maximum data security and reliability. We support traditional backups such as file system backups and database backups, as well as newer cloud-based solutions like cloud buckets, volumes, and database backups. We also provide real-time backups with incremental updates to maximize data recovery while minimizing storage costs. Our backup solutions are configured based on the frequency of access to the backed-up data, allowing us to prioritize which backups get updated more often than others. Additionally, we provide encryption for all backups by default ensuring the secure storage of your most sensitive data. By leveraging both traditional and modern backup solutions our organization is able to offer a comprehensive solution for secure and reliable data backup.
The key features of backup solutions: Our product is extremely reliable when it comes to protecting backups from ransomware attacks. We employ a number of advanced security measures to ensure that our backups are safe and secure from any malicious activity. Our disaster recovery plan, multi-location backup storage, immutable recovery copies and frequent backups have been designed to significantly reduce the risk of data loss or corruption.
We also use many sophisticated threat detection tools and techniques to detect any potential malicious activity before it can cause damage. With these measures in place, we are confident that our product provides one of the most secure backup systems available. Furthermore, all of our backups are regularly tested to ensure they are accessible and reliable should an incident occur.
To help in securing data: Our technology offers extremely robust protection to the backups in order to ensure customer data is secure and no loss is experienced. We use highly advanced encryption algorithms including AES-256 and SSL/TLS for encrypting data both in transit and at rest, which are considered among the strongest available. Additionally, Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) provides an extra layer of security by requiring a user to verify their identity with multiple credentials prior to accessing any protected data. Access to customer content and personal data is provided on a need-to-know basis, with restricted access granted only when necessary or required. All access is monitored and audited on a regular basis to ensure compliance with our stringent security measures.
Srividya Kannan, Founder & Director, Avaali Solutions
Zero trust and SASE will become more intertwined as hybrid work and IoT device proliferation continues to accelerate
To help in securing data: Organizations must securely, and seamlessly, connect anyone or any connected device (IoT) at edge locations to the cloud, and to applications. A Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) framework is planned to provide safe, efficient, and automated access to cloud applications and workloads through the integration of WAN capabilities. Identity and role-based access control segmentation capabilities isolate users and devices to help meet compliance requirements. SASE and the Zero Trust architectures will therefore be crucial tools for IT leaders in the year 2023 in order to provide comprehensive visibility, control, and enforcement of edge to cloud networking and security policies.
Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Director, India, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company
Yotta’s robust suite of backup, recovery and archival solutions safeguarding enterprise data
Importance of backup solutions: Yotta has built a robust suite of backup, recovery and archival solutions to safeguard enterprise data and make it always available to them. Our Backup, Recovery and Archival as-a-service offers an end-to-end flexible, scalable, and reliable backup and recovery environment for all kinds of physical, virtual and application data.
The key features of backup solutions: Yotta’s Endpoint Backup and Archival solution, Yotta Safe eliminates endpoint backup and recovery hassles by ensuring unified visibility and control of data through advanced features including auto-discovery and self-service dashboard for IT teams and administrators to manage their backup environment, end-to-end encryption, geo-locate and remote data wipe capabilities, and prevention of data loss due to ransomware – all with scalability, simplicity and cost-effectiveness.
To help in securing data: With data residing across captive data centers, public cloud, private cloud and corporate endpoints, organisations need to revisit their backup and recovery practices, which were earlier largely captive data center and corporate network oriented. Today’s IT environment needs a comprehensive backup and recovery framework that covers data residing on every layer of IT infrastructure.
Moreover, many cyber threats, including ransomware, loom large over mission-critical and sensitive data. Cyber attackers are exploiting the expanded digital footprint of enterprises, finding vulnerabilities and launching targeted ransomware attacks. This makes it imperative for IT leaders and cybersecurity strategists to not just devise a failproof cybersecurity framework, but also choose backup solutions that offer integrated data security capabilities with encryption, multi-factor authentication, built-in prevention against data loss due to ransomware, along with compliance to the highest global standards on data security.
Sashishekar Panda, VP and Head - Products & Services, Yotta Infrastructure
Aerospike enabling administrators to define fine-grained audit trails to track important system events
Importance of backup solutions: The Aerospike backup program, ‘as backup,’ gathers data from all the nodes and puts them into files. This can be done while the cluster is up and serving requests. The machine with the backup does not need to be a node within the cluster, but it must have network access to the cluster. The backup process is configurable, and Aerospike has recommendations to ensure that the backup does not affect normal transactions. Most customers can take backups within a few hours with these settings. The backup system runs at a lower priority than the front-end service, so that a backup can take varying amounts of time.
The key features of backup solutions: Two data centers located in public or private clouds might be spread across vast geographical distances, they can be in two separate buildings, or they can be in two separate racks. Aerospike geographically distributed asynchronous replication technology – Cross-Datacenter Replication or XDR allows for data replication in real time. If one or both data centers go down, the Aerospike XDR solution allows them to be repopulated and available on a different cluster(s).
To help in securing data: When it comes to securing operational data, it pays to play it safe. And Aerospike clients in financial services, retail, telecommunications, Ad-tech, and other industries are doing just that, thanks to the system’s comprehensive suite of security features that protect client data from unauthorized or inappropriate access. Aerospike even enables administrators to define fine-grained audit trails to track important system events, such as attempted logins and data access operations. There are four key steps Aerospike makes to safeguard data from ransomware and other attacks; authorization, authentication, encryption and audit trail.
Aveekshith Bushan, Vice President - Asia Pacific & Japan, Aerospike
Barracuda backup solutions defending businesses against ransomware and other cyber-threats
Importance of backup solutions: As present-day complex infrastructures and targeted cyber-attacks require a comprehensive backup strategy that safeguards data wherever it is stored— on-premises or in the cloud. With different deployment options, Barracuda backup solutions defend businesses against ransomware and other cyber-threats to minimize downtime, prevent data loss, and address compliance requirements. To meet the growing demand for data protection services and better serve local customers in India, Barracuda added a regional data center in India to help customers comply with relevant data regulations and policies.
The key features of backup solutions: Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup, a cloud-native backup solution, offers fast performance, highly granular restore capabilities, scale and resiliency to protect Microsoft 365 data born in the cloud. It is also available as a built-in component of Barracuda Email Protection, a comprehensive email security platform to protect businesses against email-borne threats. Additionally, we also have Barracuda Backup to protect hybrid physical, virtual, and SaaS environments.
To help in securing data: With ransomware attacks multiplying tenfold, having an efficient backup help to recover after a ransomware attack. Therefore, it’s crucial to backup all your important data – including SaaS data in Microsoft 365.
Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup not only makes it easy to find and restore the data; it also offers important features, including immutable storage, to protect the data against modification or removal, except through the secure Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup interface. User data is further protected by security features, including Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), 5 levels of role-based access control that determine who can do what, and end-to-end encryption.
Parag Khurana, Country Manager, Barracuda Networks India
Superior enterprise backup software and hardware help to transform an organization
Importance of backup solutions: Enterprise backup solutions have become a mission-critical technology as businesses rely more heavily than ever in the IT environments. Superior enterprise backup software and hardware can help transform an organization not only by protecting data from loss, corruption and theft, but by reducing costs, simplifying administration, streamlining compliance and unlocking more value from data assets.
At Redington Limited, as a distributor we deal with multiple Enterprise backup solutions , and as a solution provider, we offer our customers a wide range of Backup solutions, which includes On Premise, On Cloud and the Hybrid Backup Solutions for our partners and Customers. We have already used Dell EMC Data Protection, CommVault and Nakivo for our IT Infrastructure requirements.
The key features of backup solutions: Most of the solutions are Cyber Resilient to ensure your organization has a path to ransomware recovery from destructive cyber-attacks. With the features like Stronger Encryptions, RBAC, Data Deduplications, Preventive Data Sprawl, Multi location Snapshot backup, MFA and universal recovery will attain 99.9% data protection.
To help in securing data: At Redington, we have implemented Defence in Depth Cyber Security Controls, with multi layered security systems. We implemented RBAC (Role Based Access Control) in our system, to ensure the data access is enabled to the legitimated users with least privileges, which will lower down the possibility of Data Infection and integrity risks. On a hole , We have implemented CrowdStrike MDR solution for the EPP and EDR Controls, which is tightly integrated with our SIEM and DLP, with which we have almost nullified the risks from known or unknown malware ( with suspected pay loads) , File less attacks and botnets.
Pravin Kumar Sadasivam, Chief Technology Officer, Redington Limited
