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IBM Defender

Building a Fortress Around Your Data in a Hybrid Multi-Cloud World with IBM Defender

Ensuring data resilience is a constant battle for IT managers and security professionals in today’s complex hybrid multi-cloud environments. The ever-expanding IT landscape, encompassing virtual machines (VMs), databases, applications, file systems, SaaS workloads, and containers, creates a vast attack surface for cyber threats. Traditional data protection methods often need to catch up in the face of sophisticated ransomware attacks and other advanced threats. This is where IBM Storage Defender offers a comprehensive solution for end-to-end data resilience across your entire data estate. 

Smarter Threat Detection: Minimising the Blast Radius with IBM Defender

One of the critical strengths of Storage Defender lies in its advanced threat detection capabilities. The software goes beyond traditional signature-based methods, leveraging AI-powered sensors to identify ransomware and other emerging threats with high accuracy and minimal false positives.

This real-time threat detection helps to significantly reduce the “blast radius” of a security breach. By identifying and alerting security tools about malicious activity early on, organisations can take swift action to isolate infected systems and prevent further data encryption or exfiltration.

IBM Defender Demo
IBM Defender extends data resilience for enterprise data storage

Building Trustworthy Copies: The Foundation for Recovery

The new version of Storage Defender enhances data resilience by focusing on the trustworthiness of backup copies. This is critical as attackers often target backup repositories to undermine recovery efforts. 

Storage Defender now helps establish a baseline for the trustworthiness of copies, ensuring that clean, uncompromised data is available for a rapid and efficient recovery process.

Workload and Storage Inventory Management: Knowing Your Data Estate

A critical aspect of data resilience is having a comprehensive understanding of your data landscape. Storage Defender includes comprehensive workload and storage inventory management capabilities, which allow organisations to create a detailed map of their applications and data, including where it resides across the hybrid multi-cloud environment. This information becomes invaluable when formulating business continuity plans and determining the minimum viable data and applications needed to resume core operations after a cyberattack.

Orchestrated and Automated Recovery with IBM Defender: Streamlining the Path to Recovery

In the aftermath of a cyberattack, time is of the essence. Storage Defender helps to streamline the recovery process by automating the orchestration of recovery workflows, particularly for critical VMware applications. This automation eliminates manual intervention, saving valuable time and resources during a crucial moment.

Seamless Integration: Strength in Numbers

A key benefit of Storage Defender is its ability to integrate seamlessly with other IBM Storage and IBM Security solutions, including:

The holistic integration of IBM solutions strengthens the overall security posture within IBM Defender by enabling centralised management and data flow across these solutions, resulting in a unified defence against cyber threats.

Beyond IBM’s portfolio, Storage Defender demonstrates its commitment to open integration by partnering with industry leaders like Cohesity, with plans for further partnerships with other third-party data platforms. This dedication to interoperability ensures that organisations can leverage Storage Defender’s capabilities across their entire data ecosystem, regardless of vendor lock-in.

Synergy of FlashSystem and IBM Defender: A Stronger Defence

While both IBM FlashSystem and Storage Defender offer individual strengths in data resilience, their true power lies in their synergy. When used together, they create a formidable defence against cyberattacks. For example, storage administrators can leverage FlashSystem to create protection groups encompassing specific volumes, automatically backing them up based on user-defined policies and ensuring that critical data is fully protected with readily available backups.

Furthermore, Storage Defender facilitates the creation of immutable copies – unalterable data snapshots that remain immune to accidental deletion or malicious tampering. 

These immutable copies can be restored or recovered to various target locations, including geographically dispersed sites, for added protection against cyberattacks that target primary data centres. 

Further adding to the data protection layers, these immutable copies can also be replicated to another Storage Defender cluster, creating a geographically redundant backup for disaster recovery scenarios.

Automating Safeguarded Copies: A Proactive Defence

Storage Defender takes a proactive approach to data protection by allowing administrators to automate the creation of Safeguarded Copy snapshots. These are essentially cyber-resilient point-in-time copies of data shielded from human error, malicious actions, and cyberattacks. 

By isolating these backups from production data, organisations gain the ability to recover data quickly and efficiently in the event of a data loss event.

AI-Powered Defence: Fighting Fire with Fire

The cyber threat landscape is constantly evolving, with the emergence of AI-based cyberattacks posing a significant challenge. IBM recognises this growing threat and has equipped its FlashCore Module hardware and Storage Defender software with AI capabilities in the latest FCM4. These AI-powered solutions combine to provide a comprehensive defence against the most sophisticated attacks.

Beyond Resilience: Proactive Protection and Accelerated Recovery

While data resilience remains paramount, Storage Defender takes data protection a step further by offering capabilities that can help organisations prevent attacks in the first place. 

By leveraging AI and machine learning, Storage Defender can analyse data access patterns and identify anomalies that might indicate suspicious activity. This proactive approach allows IT teams to take preventative measures, such as tightening access controls or investigating potential vulnerabilities before an attack can unfold.

Furthermore, the integration between FlashSystem and Storage Defender facilitates the rapid recovery of data in the event of an attack. 

Immutable copies and automated recovery workflows enable organisations to restore critical systems and applications quickly, minimising downtime and associated business disruption. This rapid recovery capability proves especially crucial in today’s fast-paced business environment, where even a brief outage can have significant financial repercussions.

Investing in Your Data Fortress: A Sound Business Decision

In today’s data-driven economy, organisations entrust their critical information to their IT infrastructure. Cyberattacks pose a significant threat to this data, potentially causing financial losses, reputational damage, and operational disruption. IBM Storage Defender software offers a comprehensive solution for building a robust data fortress, safeguarding your organisation’s data across your hybrid multi-cloud environment.

By combining advanced threat detection, workload management, automated recovery workflows, and seamless integration with other industry-leading solutions, Storage Defender empowers IT professionals to proactively address cyber threats, minimise the impact of attacks, and ensure rapid data recovery. Its commitment to open integration further increases its value proposition, allowing organisations to leverage its capabilities regardless of their existing data storage ecosystem.

Investing in IBM Storage Defender is not just about data protection; it’s about safeguarding your organisation’s future. With a data fortress built on Storage Defender’s capabilities, you can operate with confidence, knowing your critical data is secure and readily recoverable in the face of ever-evolving cyber threats.

Don’t wait for a cyberattack to expose gaps in your data security.

Contact Covenco today to discuss your cyber resilience strategy. Our experienced team can help you assess your current defences and identify areas for improvement. We also offer a free security assessment or gap analysis report, providing valuable insights into potential vulnerabilities within your backup and recovery policies.

Take a proactive approach to data security – contact Covenco today. Let us help you build a data fortress with IBM Storage Defender.