Four minute ransomware recovery

Nebulon has unveiled Nebulon TimeJump, a solution architected to address key ransomware mitigation challenges faced by CIOs and CISOs. Nebulon TimeJump is the first and only combined server and storage solution architected to offer complete ransomware recovery in less than four minutes.

According to pro-consumer technology website Comparitech, an investigation of 186 ransomware attacks on US businesses in 2020 found that downtime costs alone totalled $20.9B, averaging a staggering $112M per attack. Bringing application data back online quickly, reliably, and at scale is imperative. Ransomware recovery solutions offered by traditional 3-tier and hyperconverged infrastructure vendors can address part of the problem with a “snapshot” of customer data. However, when ransomware strikes, the attack can infect operating systems and disable critical infrastructure, preventing immediate recovery from data snapshots. The resulting infrastructure recovery can take hours—or even days—and lead to unnecessary downtime costs.

Nebulon TimeJump provides four-minute restore capabilities not only for critical application data but also infected operating systems, so application infrastructure can be brought back online near-instantly. With the debut of TimeJump, IT organisations no longer have to suffer through a lengthy manual recovery of critical infrastructure. They can instead reduce application infrastructure recovery from hours or days to under four minutes.

“A ransomware attack on your business is more a case of when, not if. Therefore, any ransomware protection strategy must go beyond prevention tactics and incorporate rapid recovery to mitigate downtime and related costs,” said David Floyer, CTO and Cofounder, Wikibon. “The recovery solution from Nebulon is independent of the servers and allows the restoration of both data and the underlying operating systems. This capability means IT can restore whole application clusters online in minutes.”

“Minimising the impact of ransomware attacks is critical for the continuous service delivery demanded by our clients. Therefore, naturally we implement preventative measures. Being able to recover quickly is imperative when—not if—ransomware strikes, but recovery tools aren’t accessible when their supporting infrastructure is infected.” said Damon Dance, Director of Sales, Inca Cloud. “Nebulon is our antidote to the paradox of management tools depending on the infrastructure they manage. If/when our infrastructure is ever compromised, Nebulon TimeJump will get our infrastructure back up and running so we can restore operations in minutes. No other combined server and storage solution on the market can do this that quickly.”

Not only does Nebulon provide a breakthrough ransomware recovery solution, the company’s smartInfrastructure offering also protects against ransomware attacks due to a day-one design decision. All critical enterprise data services, such as erasure coding, encryption and snapshots, are enabled by Nebulon’s PCIe-based services processing unit (SPU). The SPU connects to the server’s internal solid-state disks (SSDs) and operates in a separate security domain from the server’s CPU, memory, network, and operating system. Isolated compute and storage security domains prevent ransomware from infecting the data protection software that enables reliable recovery of the operating system and application data. Alternative solutions like hyperconverged infrastructure share server and storage security domains, so a ransomware attack on the server easily infects storage resources and protection software. This is particularly problematic when infrastructure management tools used for recovery depend on a healthy hypervisor, operating system, and software defined storage (SDS) data services.

Beyond rapid ransomware recovery and an architected security domain within the server, Nebulon further immunises the infrastructure against the persistent threat of cyber criminals. Nebulon ON, the company’s cloud control plane, employs end-to-end hardware-based cryptographic authentication, and all communications are protected by always-on, end-to-end encryption.

“CIOs and CISOs are squarely focused on protecting their organisations from hackers on the lookout for the most vulnerable infrastructure attack vectors,” said Nebulon CEO Siamak Nazari. “Nebulon can help them sleep a little better at night knowing that our solution can both minimise the data services attack surface for ransomware, as well as help simply and quickly recover in under four minutes—an industry first we a proud to be a part of.”