Eric Herzog is the Chief Marketing Officer at Infinidat.
It’s your choice as an IT professional, cybersecurity expert, CIO or CISO: You log in to your corporate network and believe whatever it is you want to believe about cyberattacks, especially malware or ransomware. You don’t even think about enterprise storage, and the story ends. Or, you stay in the “wonderland” of cyber-resilient enterprise storage and see how deep the rabbit hole goes in reality versus the illusion of the vulnerability of data infrastructure.
Along the same lines as what the character Morpheus says in the iconic movie The Matrix, all I am offering is the truth about cyber storage resilience. Nothing more.
Piercing The Veil
As we head into Cybersecurity Awareness Month, it’s important to challenge conventional thinking and outdated assumptions about cyber threats against enterprises. Understanding cyberattacks and being able to safeguard your enterprise against them entails piercing through the veil of misconceptions. Before practical advice can be offered, the misconceptions must be exposed.
Misconception No. 1: Cybercriminals don’t launch cyberattacks against enterprise storage infrastructure.
You don’t have to be red-pilled about cyber resilience to grasp the reality that cybercriminals do launch sophisticated cyberattacks directly against enterprise storage infrastructure. That’s where an enterprise’s most important asset (the data) is, and it can be compromised or taken hostage.
Misconception No. 2: Conventional cybersecurity measures can stop all cyberattacks, including ransomware and malware.
It’s not enough to rely on conventional cybersecurity to fill the gaps. Despite the fact that you may have a “killer” security operations center (SOC) and data center-wide cybersecurity applications (SIEM and SOAR), the conventional approach does not bridge to immediate detection of intrusion into the enterprise storage infrastructure.
If you don’t have automated cyber protection proactively working seamlessly with your SOC and cybersecurity applications, the manual process of initiating the snapshotting of data will become a stumbling block.
Misconception No. 3: Snapshots of data do not need to be completely immutable.
To put a finer point on it, IT leaders of many companies may think that the snapshots their systems are taking of data are immutable, but they actually aren’t. In many snapshot implementations, there is a backdoor. This means they can be altered, corrupted or encrypted, as part of an elaborate cyberattack. It’s details like this that get CISOs and CIOs in trouble.
Misconception No. 4: Cyberattacks are always immediate. If it doesn’t happen right away, you’re safe.
The notion that a ransomware attack or malware attack is always immediate is an illusion or simulated reality designed to trick the cybersecurity teams responsible for enterprise IT infrastructure. A cybercriminal can linger in a company’s storage infrastructure for months without doing anything—just observing, tracking, learning and waiting for that optimal opportunity when they can do the maximum damage by catching the company off guard. They go undetected until they are ready to strike.
Misconception No. 5: As long as you have backed up your enterprise’s data, you’re fine to restore the data after an attack. No cyber detection is needed.
Virtually all CIOs and CISOs know that cyberattacks are inevitable, but there is a commonly held misbelief among many IT professionals that data backup is sufficient by itself. Since cybercriminals understand this is the most common belief among IT leadership, they will launch their cyberattacks not just at your primary storage but also at your backup copies as well.
The problem with this belief, however, is that you could actually restore corrupted data, given that cybercriminals will have attacked your backup copies, too. Your current system may not detect that the data is compromised, and then you’d be restoring data that you shouldn’t be restoring. This only causes more problems, and this can lead to wasting resources, losing time and extending the destructive access that cybercriminals would have to your data infrastructure.
These misconceptions have lingered for a long time, like the matrix of simulated reality for enterprise data storage. Are you “the one” to set your enterprise free from these misconceptions?
Best Practices For Overcoming ‘The Matrix’ Of Cyberattacks
Now that we are anchored in reality that cybercriminals do indeed inflict cyberattacks on storage infrastructure—both primary storage and the backup copies—and will wait weeks or months to launch such a brutal attack that can cripple or shut down an enterprise, we can take an honest look at what the remedy is: cyber storage resilience.
• Be sure to use immutable snapshots that are truly immutable—with no backdoor.
• Check that the cyber storage solution you adopt incorporates logical air gapping and fenced forensic environments.
• Do not settle for anything less than near-instantaneous recovery of data (one minute or less).
• Embrace AI/ML-driven cyber detection that is built directly into primary storage.
• Integrate seamlessly automated cyber protection with your security operations center or cybersecurity applications.
This combination of cyber storage resilience defines next-generation data protection, which is a significant technological advancement above and beyond modern data protection and traditional data protection. It is a key to unlocking the truth about addressing, disrupting and resolving “the matrix” of cyberattacks.
You have the power to choose: You can either remain in legacy thinking and keep putting off developing and implementing a cyber storage resilience strategy because you don’t want to think about enterprise storage.
Or, you can take on the serious security “holes” that your storage infrastructure may currently have and plug them with the capabilities available through next-generation data protection—taking true immutable snapshots, separating a storage volume, creating an isolated space for forensic analysis of data, facilitating the rapid recovery of data, enacting built-in cyber resilience, and deploying automated cyber protection. This is anchored in a cyber-powered, recovery-first mindset to defeat the matrix of cyberattacks.
Instead of saying, “I know kung fu,” like Neo, the main character in The Matrix, you can now say, “I know cyber storage resilience.” Show me!
Forbes Communications Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?