When a cyberattack occurs, it is crucial for a business to recover quickly. A cyberattack (such as a ransomware or malware attack) requires alerting the CEO and the entire senior leadership team to protect the company and recover from any damage. This is a critical issue for all global enterprises. 

In the U.S. and Europe, an organization that has been hit by a cyberattack is required to file legal documentation, which means companies have to reveal the impact of the breach. Recently, in the U.S., a large enterprise noted in its public filing that a cyberattack cost them $2.9 billion – a huge and unplanned expense.

This reality has put data protection in a bigger spotlight. Because companies continue to pay the ransom for data that has been taken “hostage” or pay for the damages caused by a large-scale cyberattack, it’s clear that the conventional approach to data protection is not effective at combating cyber threats. Current methods need to be augmented with newer, more effective capabilities. 

This is where next-generation data protection comes in. 

What Is Next-Generation Data Protection?

Next-generation data protection was created to combat today’s most sophisticated and dangerous cyberattacks. It expands the purview of what is protected and how it is protected within an enterprise data infrastructure. This new approach also adds preemptive and predictive capabilities that help mitigate the effects of massive cyberattacks. 

Moreover, next-generation data protection is the last line of defense against the most vicious, unscrupulous cyber criminals who want nothing more than to take down and harm large companies, either for monetary gain or respect amongst fellow criminals. Therefore, understanding and implementing next-generation data protection is vital. 

If you are only going to remember one thing from this article, remember this: Next-generation data protection includes the traditional aspects of data protection, such as the ability to handle backup repositories and to snapshot and replicate data. But the next generation of data protection also includes cyber storage resilience and ultra-rapid cyber recovery.

To expand on this concept, next-gen data protection provides a cyber-focused, recovery-first methodology that calls for true immutability of data. Immutable copies of data are required for secure data analysis following a cyberattack.

This capability goes far beyond the traditional outlook, which basically only saw immutability as a compliance issue. Some companies have even used a “backdoor” to circumvent the immutability and be able to unlock the data, a measure that leaves open the possibility of compromise and misuse. In contrast, true immutability is built into next-gen data protection, making it key to recovery. The data cannot be altered or changed in any way. There is no “backdoor.”

“Recovery-first” means the endpoint is the priority. This can be achieved by leveraging immutable snapshots and ensuring that the data is proactively verified and validated before a cyberattack occurs. In this way, recovery can happen quickly and successfully. 

To make data protection highly effective today for the datasets that seem most critical, it has to be highly integrated and orchestrated. You don’t want a manual process making a weak spot for your organization. To resolve this issue, one of the breakthrough capabilities of next-generation data protection is automated cyber protection. 

Automated cyber protection seamlessly integrates cyber storage resilience into a cyber security operation center (SOC) and data center-wide cyber security applications, such as SIEM and SOAR cyber applications. At the first signal of a cyberattack, an immutable snapshot of your data is taken automatically. There is no manual process of the security team calling up the storage admin to say that there is a potential cyberattack underway. It’s now all automated, merging data center cybersecurity with cyber-resilient storage. 

Indeed, automated cyber protection paves the way to rapid cyber recovery because it kicks off the process of obtaining a known clean copy of data that can be validated as 100% free of corruption. 

Why Should Enterprise Tech Buyers Care?

Now that you know the meaning of next-generation data protection versus traditional or modern data protection schemes, the next question is: Why should you care? 

Taking a cyber-focused, recovery-first approach allows you to gain leverage over cyber attackers, which will enable you to get your data back within seconds.

Below are five other reasons you should care about next-generation data protection:

1. You will achieve the best possible outcome if you get attacked by malware or ransomware. 

A cyber-focused, recovery-first methodology is a proven approach to making the best of a bad situation. You know your organization will get hit with an attack at some point, if it has not happened already. You can recover if you take an outcome-centric viewpoint that guides your next move. 

2. Backups are target attack points.

If cybercriminals compromise your backup system, they will disable the backups before they corrupt your data on primary storage. This is the reason you have to be proactive. Conventional backup systems are optimized for backup, not for restore. The size and amount of data that needs to be recovered is not a great situation for traditional restore methodologies. They are slow and cumbersome. You have to restore data back to every individual server, which is time-consuming and complex. Next-generation data protection solves these challenges. 

3. When you think about recovery first, protecting the data becomes easier.

Being proactive in optimizing for the restoration of data makes it simpler on the backend. It’s a must-have to know that your company has the appropriate amount of automation to safeguard your data infrastructure. With automated cyber protection and cyber detection on primary storage, you – and the CIO, CTO, CEO, and CFO – will sleep better at night. 

4. Get your data back in the snap of your fingers.

Recovery of data has to be fast. Indeed, it needs to be ultra-fast. If it’s slow (i.e., days to recover data), then it’s not working at the speed of enterprise business. It’s not working at the speed of compute. With the right cyber storage resilient capability built into your storage infrastructure, you can get your data back within seconds. 

5. You have gained leverage back from the attackers.

Do not underestimate your ability to gain an advantage on cyber criminals. Cyber-resilient storage is the first place to look for your tool to gain leverage. 

Don’t settle for bolt-on solutions. Bolt-ons simply help to show what is happening in backup. Instead, you need cyber storage resilience to be built into the primary storage systems. It’s essential to put cyber recovery at the forefront of your thinking.