How Long Will It Take You to Restore Your Data? The Ransomware Recovery Countdown

Ransomware attacks have surged in sophistication and frequency, posing a significant threat to organizations of all sizes. Attackers now often lie dormant within networks for extended periods, compromising multiple systems simultaneously and hindering immediate recovery efforts. This evolution has made rapid data restoration a critical concern.

The Challenge: Extended Downtime and Slow Recovery

The primary challenge lies in the extended downtime during data recovery. Traditional methods, reliant on restoring from backups, can be agonizingly slow. Users frequently report restore speeds far below vendor specifications, sometimes achieving only hundreds of megabytes per second. At such rates, restoring petabytes of data can take weeks, during which the organization suffers from limited functionality, performance degradation, and a severely compromised user experience.

The Solution: Instant Recovery with Snapshots

The most effective way to achieve near-instantaneous recovery is through the use of snapshots stored on primary storage systems. Snapshots allow for rapid data restoration to a point-in-time state, minimizing downtime to mere minutes. However, this approach requires a robust storage infrastructure capable of maintaining numerous snapshots over extended periods without performance degradation.

Limitations of Traditional Backup Solutions

Traditional backup solutions, which copy data to secondary storage targets, often fall short in providing rapid recovery. Even All-Flash Array (AFA)-based backup targets cannot match the performance of primary storage systems. Furthermore, the process of restoring data from a backup target to primary storage introduces significant network overhead and can lead to performance bottlenecks.

Hybrid Storage: Balancing Performance and Cost

To address these limitations, organizations can leverage hybrid storage solutions. Hybrid systems combine the speed of flash storage with the cost-effectiveness of traditional hard disk drives, enabling the retention of numerous snapshots over extended periods without incurring excessive costs.

Hybrid storage systems can deliver the performance needed for frequent snapshot creation while keeping costs manageable by storing older snapshots on lower-cost drives. In the event of a ransomware attack, critical data can be rapidly restored from flash storage, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity.

Why Some Storage Systems Limit Snapshots

Cost-Performance Trade-offs: 

Legacy storage systems, designed for HDD-based environments, often struggle with the performance demands of snapshot-intensive workloads. This limitation restricts the number of snapshots that can be maintained and the frequency of their creation.

Cost Considerations: 

Storing numerous snapshots on high-performance flash drives can be prohibitively expensive. Hybrid storage offers a solution by intelligently tiering data between flash and disk, optimizing cost without sacrificing performance.

Backup Target Systems with AFA: A Contradiction?

Inverted Logic: Using expensive AFA systems solely for backups is akin to insuring a car by purchasing another one that sits idle in the garage. This approach incurs significant costs without providing the performance needed for rapid recovery.

Replication as an Alternative: If an organization has already invested in an AFA system, replicating the primary storage to the backup target offers a more efficient recovery strategy. This approach avoids the need to restore large volumes of data and minimizes downtime.

Hybrid Backup Targets: The only viable backup target solution is a hybrid storage system that offers high write performance, long-term retention at a low cost, and the ability to quickly promote critical data to flash in the event of an attack.

Conclusion

Rapid recovery from ransomware attacks is essential for business continuity. Snapshot-based recovery on primary storage systems offers the fastest and most reliable approach. Hybrid storage solutions enable organizations to maintain numerous snapshots over extended periods without incurring excessive costs. By adopting a proactive approach to data protection, organizations can minimize the impact of ransomware attacks and ensure business resilience.