Kathy Gibson reports from Pinnacle Tech Tour – There is no longer any debate about whether organisations are going to be hit by cyberattacks – it’s a case of when it will happen, and how often.
This is the word from Ganeshan Naidoo, a systems engineer from Dell Technologies, who points out that analysts are clear on the need for organisations to focus on how quickly they can recover when an attack happens.
“This means they need reliable, verifiable data backup that is kept on- and off-site,” he says.
Dell asked customers what they are experiencing in the current landscape and the responses are sobering: 37% had to lay off staff after an attack; 35% had to lay off executives;
63% say they were only able to identify an attack or intrusion six months after it happened; and 73% say they were targeted with cyberattacks at least once in the last 12 months.
“Attacks are happening all the time,” Naidoo stresses.
Worldwide, there are regulatory requirements to create an airgapped copy of data, an immutable copy, or an offsite version of the data.
Customers also need to understand where cyberthreats are coming from. Many of them are crime and extortion, but there is also terrorism, warfare, espionage, hacktivism, and more.
Cyber resilience needs to be a strategy for all organisations, focusing on many areas of the business.
A cyber resilience framework includes the need to identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover.
Dell focuses on recovery, with a data protection solution that isolates business critical data away from attack surfaces.
Critical data is stored immutably in a hardened vault so it can be restored after an attack.
Naidoo stresses that a data protection solution won’t protect against an attack – but it does ensure the data is safe.
Dell focuses on the three Is of cyber resilience: Immutability ensures that data integrity is preserved; Isolation so data stays physically and logically separated; and Intelligence with machine learning and analytics to identify threats.
More than 2 000 customers are using Dell’s cyber recovery and data protection solutions, either on-premise, in a co-location, in the public cloud, or in a multi-cloud environment.
“So irrespective of where the customer’s data is, we can protect it,” Naidoo says.
Dell PowerProtect cyber recovery ensures the recovery of critical data in the case of a cyberattack by isolating critical data in a cyber recovery vault that is airgapped or isolated from operational systems.
CyberSense software uses machine learning and analytics to analyse data, offering attack type notification, ransomware detection, corrupted file details, data changes or deletions, breached user accounts, breached executables, and last good backup copy.
There is a single dashboard for PowerProtect and CyberSense to enable intelligent recovery.