Organisations have stepped up their focus on backup and recovery as they face an ever increasingly likelihood of falling victim to cyber crime. This is according to speakers participating in an IBM EMEA webinar on boosting cyber resilience with IBM Storage and Predatar, the cyber recovery platform that adds another dimension to IBM’s Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus.
Roland Leins, Business Development Executive for Storage Software at IBM Europe, said data protection had to be transformed as organisations made cyber resiliency a top priority. “Modernising data protection for resilience has become crucial. A common mistake is to architect for backup, but organisations must architect for quick recovery to meet the SLAs for the data – this can be the difference between getting the business up again or going out of business completely,” he said. Automation is also necessary to ensure that the necessary recovery happens in a repeatable consistent manner to meet the business SLAs.”
Ben Hodge, Head of Marketing at Predatar, said while the NIST best practice framework covers identify, protect, detect, respond and recover, many organisations have focused on identifying, protecting and detecting in the past. “Organisations are increasingly realising it is quite likely their defences will be breached. There’s a refocusing on response and recovery for a fast and effective response. As they refocus, they are realising they have big challenges to overcome. Predatar is all about the response and recovery, working hand in hand with IBM storage and defences. It is the final piece of the puzzle,” he said.
Built for IBM Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus environments, the Predatar cyber recovery orchestration platform takes resiliency to the next level with capabilities to rival any enterprise backup and recovery solution. Predatar’s cyber analytics and real-time alerts have been built to help infrastructure and security teams cut through the noise of complex backup systems to show them their recoverability risk factors on a configurable dashboard. Predatar IQ instantly notifies users of anomalies, changes and issues in their backup environment as they occur, while Data Explorer lets organisations explore the environment to discover new recoverability insights.
Hodge noted that around two-thirds of backup recoveries failed to meet the recovery time objectives for business continuity. “Recovering cleanly is becoming increasingly difficult because of the dwell time malware can sit inside the storage environment before being discovered; being replicated into backup and storage. If organisations are infected deep and wide, recovery will reinfect the infected environment. Around 10% of backup recoveries fail to recover – there could be critical business data in there and organisations can’t afford to have holes in their data,” he said.
“Our cyber recovery orchestration uses automated workflows and AV tools and XDR/EDR tools to continually recover backup workloads, scan them to ensure they are clean. The only way you can be certain you can recover quickly, cleanly and completely is by testing it continually. We also have cyber analytics built in to serve users with data and insights to understand the overall health and recoverability of the backup environments. With machine learning and artificial intelligence overlaid on these analytics, Predatar learns and, over time, it becomes smarter and capable of finding more infections, faster. With Spectrum Protect, Predatar is running in the background, running tests and plugs into SEIM platforms such as QRadar. Predatar continuously searches across backups to look for known infection signatures and identify dormant malware, and will recover suspicious backup workloads to an isolated CleanRoom, scan them for viruses, clean them and restore them to production. By continually scanning your backups in the background, Predatar finds, quarantines and eliminates dormant viruses and malware before they can wreak havoc.”
In SA through Axiz
Craig Botha, Business Development Manager: Advanced Technologies: IBM at Axiz, says Predatar is a compelling solution for anyone tasked with protecting, backing up and recovering data.
“With Predatar running continuous recovery testing and backup data validation, scheduled testing, randomised testing with ML behaviour-based testing, organisations will be able to recover backups quickly, cleanly and completely. What’s exciting is that IBM has taken tried and trusted technology and packaged it with Predatar for an all-in-one solution: you get the full muscle of QRadar enterprise security information and event management (SIEM) in a modern, midrange storage device. It’s new and exciting thinking from IBM. An impressive differentiator is that it’s continuously learning – the AI built into it is phenomenal,” says Botha. “It gets to a point where it knows exactly what team needs the backup, and which data is most important to the company, and adapts to cater for priorities.
He notes that Predatar brings key data protection and backup features into one solution, enabling cyber security and storage teams to do more with less. “There’s a massive cyber skills problem, and there’s a lot of burnout among those with too much to do. Restoring data using traditional methods can be a nightmare – backups might not work, or tapes may be damaged. But Predatar is the future come early, making restoring an immutable copy quick and easy. It’s the future come early. For South African businesses, it addresses challenges around skills and cost,” he says.
“We have been asking for this for some time, and now we have it as part of our portfolio, along with Spectrum Protect and Protect Plus for a complete cyber resiliency story.”
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