How effective is your ‘Cyber Stack’?

The risk and frequency of cyberattacks today means that finding solutions to deliver proactive protection through sophisticated AI and deep content analysis is imperative. This is your ‘Cyber Stack’, and it comprises all the essential capabilities needed by today’s enterprises if they want to be truly cyber resilient. 

Here’s why cyber resilience is so critical. As organisations have transitioned towards a data driven economy, these deep content analysis capabilities are essential because they enable unrivalled forensic analysis and cyberattack reporting. Additionally, by employing proactive cyber detection, you can be guaranteed of far superior threat detection performance.

Essential Cyber Stack ingredients

If an attack is detected proactively, or an active attack is in progress, these advanced solutions use the results of deep content analytics to generate detailed forensic reporting and provide actionable intelligence. Their scope of action covers seven key capabilities:

1. Ability to map the attack's impact and progress

2. Identification of known ransomware varieties and outcomes

3. Mapping an attack timeline and data changes with precision

4. Maintaining a full audit trail for compliance and examination purposes

5. Dashboard reporting showing key event information, e.g. time, type, and scope of the attack, with details of immutable snapshots containing uncompromised data

6. Sourcing the latest clean versions of damaged data for rapid recovery

7. Capability to track the origin of compromised data.

Proactive vs reactive cyber protection approaches

Early detection of an impending attack is more important than detection once an attack is underway. Yet, in spite of this, many enterprise storage companies persist in offering ransomware/cyberattack detection capabilities based on “Anomaly Detection” technology. This works by identifying deviations from normal behaviour or established working patterns on the basis that unusual activities might indicate an attack. For example, unusual I/O patterns, changes to data encryption, changes to file metadata and changes to the number of files. These approaches are reactive and far less effective than proactive threat detection – because once the attack has taken place, it is most likely too late. The data compromised has probably already been written to storage and may even have been captured as snapshots. And once compromised data has been backed up, it becomes a very lengthy process to identify clean recovery points.

Other shortfalls associated with this method of detection arise because it only really analyses surface-level metadata or overall trends. This means any corruption that occurs within the content of the files - such as subtle data modifications, partial encryption, or database page-level corruption - is not detected. It can also miss ransomware attacks that maintain the original metadata and there are many other potential issues. Ask yourself this question: can you really be confident about the status of your data if file and database content is not being proactively and thoroughly scanned?

Instead, best practice advice is to invest in proactive detection, using AI-powered deep analytics. This will ensure that in the event of detection, you’re well covered with comprehensive forensic reporting. You can perform a deep content analysis to accurately determine “known good” copies of data and restore them quickly. These capabilities are one of the most important elements of a “total storage cyber resilience solution” that’s designed to deliver a "cyber-first and recovery-focused strategy". 

It’s what we call next-generation data protection and it includes five fundamental pillars of protection. These are as follows: 1) Fully Immutable Snapshots, 2) Built-in Logical and Remote Air-Gapping, 3) A Fenced Forensic Environment, 4) Guaranteed Near-Instantaneous Recovery from Immutable Snapshots, and 5) Automated Cyber Protection (ACP) seamless integration with SIEM, SOAR, and Security Operations Centres for early warning detection capabilities.

Perhaps the most critical factors influencing post cyberattack recovery time are how well an enterprise is prepared for the inevitable attack, and how strong are its response capabilities. Experience shows us that enterprises with well-defined and tested response plans always recover more quickly. In contrast, the organisations lacking these proven plans often struggle to recover.

Invest in your Cyber Stack and protect your future

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, your ‘Cyber Stack’ is the cornerstone of robust cyber preparedness and a swift response. By enabling proactive cyber detection and forensic recovery, you can be assured of a cyber resilient platform that guarantees critical data protection and near-instantaneous recovery capabilities. 

With industry-leading cyber resilience in place, your enterprise can operate with confidence - free from the constant worry of cybercriminals encrypting or holding your valuable data hostage. According to several industry sources it is estimated that the world’s data volume will surge towards 175-200 zettabytes by the end of 2025 - so, now is the time to ensure your organisation is fully prepared for the inevitable. Invest in your Cyber Stack today and proactively secure your future against cyber threats tomorrow.