![INFINIDAT, Chief Marketing Officer: Storage is Critical to Cybersecurity Strategy](http://media.assettype.com/cdo%2Fimport%2Fcdomagazine.tech%2Fcontent%2Ftncms%2Fassets%2Fv3%2Feditorial%2Fd%2F6b%2Fd6b9a907-20ba-502d-9e0b-af592e6d94a7%2F6263c0381d232.preview.jpg?w=480&auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max)
(US and Canada) Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer, INFINIDAT, speaks with Mark Johnson, Regional VP, Fusion Alliance and Editorial Board Chair, CDO Magazine, about the need for an efficient cyber security strategy and how storage resilience fits into the scenario.
Herzog maintains that cyber resilience impacts everything across all sizes of companies, organizations and governments. He cites a Fortune magazine survey saying CEOs of Fortune 500 companies regard cybersecurity as a prime threat to their businesses. “That's why storage is so critical to a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy from an IT side for any company, big, medium, or small,” Herzog adds.
Attacks generally take around 287 days from start to end, he explains, and the threats can be external or internal personnel trying to steal corporate data or introduce malware and ransomware. The absence of cyber-resilient storage as part of the overall security strategy exposes data to serious threats.
“You need edge protection and constant scanning of your entire IT infrastructure. And then, you need software that tracks the bad guys down. Wrapped around those three is storage. Cybercriminals know that if they need to get to your data, they need to control your storage,” he adds.
Elaborating on the key elements of a cyber-resilient storage solution, Herzog breaks it down into four legs.
The first leg is creating immutable snapshots that cannot be deleted or altered. The second leg is creating a logical air gap that separates the management plane and the data plane. “If you don't have that separation between the management and the storage layer, if someone steals those credentials, they could steal that immutable snapshot,” he explains.
The third leg is creating a fenced environment. “Let's assume you really do have a malware or ransomware attack. You've got thousands of backup copies of your data. Once you've had a malware or ransomware attack, you need to clean off your primary storage. Then you have to get a known good copy of the data. You go into this fenced environment and you test and make sure that the backup copy doesn't have malware ransomware. If it does, you'll go back to previous days, starting at the most recent and going backward, to find a known good copy of the data,” Herzog says.
The last leg is rapid recovery, he notes. “With rapid recovery, you can recover data. And we actually did this recently at one of our launches. We recovered 1.5 petabytes of data in 12 minutes.”