In what appears to be a tangible sign of its commitment to its acquired Veritas data protection product portfolio, Cohesity has issued a v11.0 major release of NetBackup.
It features extended encryption to defend against quantum attacks, more user behavior monitoring, and an extended range of cloud services protection.
Cohesity SVP and chief product officer Vasu Murthy stated: “This represents the most powerful NetBackup software release to date for defending against today’s sophisticated threats and preparing for those to come …The latest NetBackup features give customers smarter ways to minimize the impact of attacks now and post-quantum.”
NetBackup v11.0 adds quantum-proof encryption, claiming to guard against “harvest now, decrypt later” quantum computing attacks. Quantum-proof encryption is designed to resist attacks from quantum computers, which could potentially break current encryption methods. Encrypted data could, it is theorized, be copied now and stored for later decryption using a yet-to-be-developed quantum computer. Post-quantum cryptography uses, for example, symmetric cryptographic algorithms and hash functions that are thought to be resistant to such attacks. The US NIST agency is involved in these quantum-proof encryption efforts.
Cohesity claims that NetBackup v11.0 “protects long-term confidentiality across all major communication paths within NetBackup, from encrypted data in transit and server-side dedupe, to client-side dedupe, and more.”
v11.0 also includes a wider range of checks looking for unusual user actions, saying it’s a “unique capability” and “can stop or slow down an attack, even when threat actors compromise administrative credentials.”
It automatically provides recommended security setting values. An included Adaptive Risk Engine v2.0 monitors user activity, looking for oddities such as unusual policy updates and user sign-in patterns. Alerts and actions can then be triggered, with Cohesity saying “malicious configuration changes can be stopped by dynamically intercepting suspicious changes with multi-factor authentication.”
A Security Risk Meter provides a graphic representation of various risks across security settings, data protection, and host communication.
NetBackup 11.0 has broadened Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) protection to include Yugabyte, Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon Neptune, Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server and Oracle Snapshots, Azure Cosmos DB (Cassandra and Table API), and Azure DevOps/GitHub/GitLab.
It also enables image replication and disaster recovery from cloud archive tiers like Amazon S3 Glacier and Azure Archive.
The nonprofit Sheltered Harbor subsidiary of the US FS-ISAC (Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center) has endorsed NetBackup for meeting the most stringent cybersecurity requirements of US financial institutions and other organizations worldwide.
A Cohesity blog by VP of Product Management Tim Burowski provides more information. NetBackup v11.0 is now available globally.
