Cyber threats are occurring at an increasing rate and are also making it more challenging to protect your organization from. The most recent attack occurred in Texas and affected 23 towns; when the governor issues a level 2 escalated response, it’s time to start paying attention and taking your data protection goals more seriously if you haven’t already.
While organizations scramble to put in place the appropriate security measures, we want discuss one of our top recommended protocols, the Dell EMC Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA).
What is an integrated data protection appliance (IDPA)?
The Dell EMC Integrated Data Protection Appliance is a converged solution offering backup, replication, deduplication, recovery & restore.
The appliance combines Dell Data Domain, Data Protection Advisor, Dell EMC Avamar, and Data Protection search into one single appliance.
You might think that combining so many product features into one appliance would make it a complex solution, but the Dell IDPA leverages a unified HTML5 interface so that you don’t have to manage multiple interfaces.
How does the integrated data protection appliance help with the increasing threat of cyber-attacks?
Local and off-site Isolation
The Dell EMC IDPA protects data locally and replicates to offsite datacenters to provide air gap security in the event of an infection. By having an appliance that is isolated from your internal network, you can prevent the spreading of the infection to protected data.
Data is updated by creating temporary network links to the source data, this ensures that the protected offsite data is at risk for as little time as possible. Automation is key in making these solutions secure and robust.
By having an appliance that is offsite and offline, you don’t have to worry about restoring corrupted files because they can’t be accessed remotely.
Entities such as the stock exchange and military are known to use this security measure due to the sensitivity of their data.
Leverages Automation
The state of IT today starts with automation. By setting predetermined policies, IT professionals are able to mitigate the risk of human error and insider threats.
Automation also enables IT staff to efficiently backup and deduplicate data on the fly, as it changes. This allows companies to maintain up-to-date backups of their data, without bloating their storage budget or sacrificing retention periods.
These automated processes ensure minimal data loss when a recovery is needed.
Business Continuity
Breaches can sometimes take a week or longer to recover critical data. Even worse, ransomware spreads quickly and often requires organizations to pay a large ransom (usually in $$$) to recover their data.
Your air-gapped Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA) ensures that your backed-up data isn’t affected so that your restore can be done safely.
Most importantly, your team can recover quickly utilizing various restore methods. Data can be restored from the onsite IDPA, the offsite solution, or spun up in the remote datacenter and accessed remotely, allowing versatile and robust recovery solutions for any disaster.
When trying to determine which security measures to take in order to mitigate the threats of cyber-attacks, there are several options out there. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, encryption, & continuous network monitoring are a few that you hear frequently.
A great place to start is with an integrated protection appliance that is completely isolated from your network so that you can be assured when a restore is needed, your data won’t be corrupted.
