Cohesity, Nasuni, and HPE’s Zerto all revealed plans to add ransomware protection products and features to their line-ups this week.
Cohesity launched an in-cloud secure storage vault called FortKnox; Nasuni claimed it has the industry’s first in-line ransomware edge detection capabilities for file data; while Zerto talked of it’s bringing its ransomware recovery capabilities to cloud providers. Zerto claims this means organizations can recover in minutes at scale to just seconds before an attack.
Cohesity
Brian Spanswick, Cohesity CISO, said: “Providing off-site data isolation through this SaaS offering is another way we are helping customers combat increasingly sophisticated attacks and accelerate recovery, while also enabling SecOps and compliance teams to sleep better at night.”
FortKnox is based on AWS’s S3 object lock technology and has strict access controls plus a quorum that requires a minimum of two or more people to approve critical actions.
It is Cohesity’s way of providing a near-equivalent to offsite tape in the classic 3-2-1 backup strategy – three copies of data, on two different media, with one of them in an off-site environment. Its announcement states that tape has a disadvantage, even though it has a strong physical air gap. “Although tape provides security isolation for data it does not allow for rapid recovery at scale, preventing teams from responding quickly to cyber security incidents, such as ransomware, where large volumes of data may be compromised.”
The FortKnox product provides a secure vault for data where it is kept locked up and out of the hands of bad actors via a virtual air gap that is achieved through physical separation and network and management isolation. This clean and secured data can be recovered from the Cohesity-managed cloud vault back to the original source location – or alternate targets, including the public cloud.
Adrian De Luca, director of Solution Architecture, Global Partner Strategic Development at AWS, said: “With Cohesity FortKnox, customers are able to utilize the scalability, security, and accessibility of AWS with Cohesity’s next-gen data management for a solution that can help protect their data from ransomware and other cybersecurity threats.”
Cohesity FortKnox is available globally from Cohesity and its partner ecosystem as a subscription-based SaaS product.
Nasuni
Nasuni chief product officer Russ Kennedy said of his company’s ransomware edge features: “Typical NAS solutions lack ransomware detection and recovery capabilities, even though they house up to 80 percent of an organisation’s data, and detecting an attack can take hours, days, or even months. The goal of our new Ransomware Protection service is for our customers to prevent data loss and avoid paying ransoms to attackers.”
This ransomware detection capability is in-line and executing, as soon as new file data is created by users or applications at any edge location. Nasuni says emerging ransomware attacks are detected in real time and the service can also easily scale to protect hundreds of edge locations and petabytes of file data.
Nasuni said the tech has been protected by US Patent No. 11,336,685, titled “Cloud-native global file system with rapid ransomware recovery.”
Nasuni Ransomware Protection is an add-on service to the latest release of the Nasuni File Data Platform. It aligns with The National Institute of Standards (NIST) model for mitigating ransomware through identification, protection, detection, response, and recovery capabilities.
The latest release of Nasuni’s File Data Platform includes Nasuni Dashboards to monitor the health and performance of their Nasuni managed platform. Nasuni Ransomware Protection is available immediately.
Zerto
HPE has announced several Zerto software improvements that bring its ransomware recovery capabilities to the big cloud providers. The new Zerto 9.5 release includes expanded immutability options with Azure and S3-compatible storage, a new Zerto Linux appliance with security enhancements, and expanded integrations with Google Cloud Platform.
Zerto VP of products Deepak Verma said: “With the capabilities we have added to the latest Zerto platform, customers are better positioned to meet new challenges head-on and mitigate their impact by recovering more quickly and with confidence.”
Zerto has added Microsoft Azure and S3-compatible storage as a destination for immutable data copies for ransomware recovery. Google Cloud Storage is now a destination platform for additional data copies for recovery. In addition, Zerto Backup for SaaS, powered by Keepit, now offers offsite immutable backups of Azure Active Directory.
A new Linux virtual appliance enables increased security through multi-factor authentication (MFA), and easy management via hands-off upgrades and troubleshooting. Zerto has instant file restore for Linux which enables users to restore directly back to the source within Linux VMs.
This is in addition to recovering entire Windows and Linux machines instantly and instant file restore for Windows.
Lasty, Zerto has said smaller users will be able to protect 10 virtual machines at no cost with the Zerto Free Edition.
