Why Enterprise Storage Should Be A Key Cybersecurity Focus
I was on my way to participate in a cybersecurity panel discussion to talk about the importance of cyber storage resilience being critical to an enterprise’s corporate security strategy when one of the other participants stopped me. He was practically shocked that I was on a cybersecurity panel because he considered me “a long-time enterprise storage guy,” which I am. He found it odd and quite funny.
Smiling, he was a friendly person, but he couldn’t understand why I was invited to speak on the same panel as he was, a cybersecurity professional who took a more traditional view of securing enterprises. He saw me as representing solely the storing of data: “What’s storage got to do with cybersecurity?”
He was unaware that I was there to talk about the cybersecurity of an enterprise storage estate was essential to avoiding the effects and possible damage of a cyberattack.
The Importance Of Enterprise Storage For Cybersecurity
It’s no laughing matter that cybercriminals are increasingly hacking into the storage infrastructure of enterprises across the world because of the lack of cyber resilience.
In fact, it is so serious that cybersecurity analysts estimate the 2023 cost of cyberattacks to be $8 trillion—yes, $8 trillion. Legacy storage systems that have not been fortified by cyber storage resilience technologies, including cyber detection and cyber recovery, have become very weak points, allowing ransomware and malware to infiltrate, like thieves in the night. Too many enterprises have not taken it seriously enough that primary storage and secondary storage need to be protected.
Cyber hackers are surely laughing at companies that overlook their storage infrastructure. They don’t mind if IT teams are only focused on protecting applications and the network. They don’t mind that IT teams are concerned with edge protection.
These criminals are savvy enough to reroute themselves to areas that are vulnerable to cyberattacks. This is why the world has seen a proliferation of ransomware and malware in recent years, such as the very high-profile cyberattack suffered by MGM Resorts International. These nefarious individuals are taking data for ransom and corrupting data to cripple enterprises, including public companies as well as government-owned critical infrastructure.
The last thing that cybercriminals want to see walking into a cybersecurity panel discussion is “an enterprise storage guy.” It’s not my Hawaiian shirt they are afraid of. They are fearful of the message that I carry to global enterprises: Lock down your storage estate, no matter whether your storage platforms are all on-premises or in a hybrid cloud configuration.
Cyber resilience is the key to securing enterprise storage infrastructure. I’ll break it down to the five core components of this much-needed storage cyber resilience for modern data protection, just as I did on the cybersecurity panel:
1. Immutable snapshots: Copies of the data that cannot be changed in any way.
2. Logical air gapping: Creating space between the management plane and data plane; segregating and protecting data as a digital asset, for the purpose, for instance, of having a known good copy of data available after a cyberattack.
3. Fenced forensic environment: Isolated domain where data can be analyzed to be sure you have a known good copy of the data before your recovery.
4. Cyber detection: Examining whether a data set is clean data or corrupted data. This can be used in two ways: to help have an early warning system that something is amiss and to scan the various candidates for recovery so that you have known good data.
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5. Rapid recovery: The ability to recover the known good copy of data—free of ransomware or malware—almost instantaneously.
With these components of cyber storage resilience added to the data infrastructure, an enterprise can more effectively avoid and/or recover from a ransomware or malware attack.
Rather than pay the “ransom” to recover data, the enterprise can simply revert to a known good copy of data, derived from the unchangeable, immutable snapshots. They subsequently scan it with cyber-detection capabilities—which you should look for as built into a primary storage solution—to make sure there is no hidden ransomware or malware embedded within.
Then they recover the data quickly. No ransom to be paid. No slow recovery of the data over days. Most importantly, no disruption to the business. Business continuity prevails.
The Decade Of Cyber Resilient Storage
After I shared this scenario on the panel, my new cybersecurity “friend” approached me to find out more. This time, he was not giggling. He was surprised that “a very long-time enterprise storage guy” was actually talking his language. But this is the way every enterprise should think of the relationship between enterprise cyber storage resilience and cybersecurity. The move to modernize data protection has widened to incorporate the security of enterprise storage.
My cybersecurity friend and I had a good laugh about how a preconceived notion about “a long-time storage guy” is outdated. Today, enterprise storage professionals are just as adept at talking about using machine-learning models to detect cyber threats and leveraging content-based analytics to inspect inside files for any sign of a cyberattack in primary storage environments as they are to talk about 100% availability, autonomous automation, guaranteed real-world application and workload performance and cloud-like consumption models.
This decade has become the decade of cyber resilient storage—with enterprise storage evolving to rapidly adapt to the evolving cyber threat landscape. Now, if only more CIOs and CISOs were ready for a “good laugh” about the changing face of enterprise storage, then virtually no enterprise would have to pay the “ransom” for data that has been held hostage. Instead of cybercriminals winning the day, we’d have the last laugh.
Eric Herzog is the Chief Marketing Officer at Infinidat. Read Eric Herzog's full executive profile here.