Kate Mollett, Senior Director, Commvault Africa.

The value of data has increased exponentially, to the point where becoming a victim of cybercrime is no longer an if, but a when. The reality is that your environment will be breached at some point because ransomware is constantly evolving, and environments are becoming increasingly complicated and complex to manage.

It has become imperative to accelerate cyber defence to ensure we can detect activity in advance and prepare accordingly. Having a data protection partner with an extensive cloud portfolio, deep integration across cloud providers and the ability to provide a seamless solution across on premise, virtualised, Software as a Service (SaaS) and everything in between is critical.

A threat like nothing before

Ransomware and cybercrime are nothing new, but the sophistication of attacks is unprecedented and is constantly increasing, thanks to artificial intelligence and other next-generation technologies. Today, organisations must deal with a whole new level of cyberthreat. Attacks can happen in minutes, and target not just production data but backups as well, leaving you with little choice other than to pay in the hope of getting your data back and your business operational again.

In addition, the complexity of the hybrid cloud environment makes data protection a daunting prospect, requiring specific skill sets and tools to handle effectively. The result is often a mix of various tools and technologies, which can hinder visibility, add complexity and vulnerability, and thus make an effective response to threats. The lines between security and Information Technology (IT) are blurring, and it has become essential to adopt a solution that bridges the gap and delivers early warnings and active defences for both backup and production environments.

Act, don’t just react

One of the most important elements of effective cyber defence today is the ability to sift through the millions of signals to find the alerts that represent a real threat. This requires an intelligent and proactive security approach. Metallic® Threatwise™, for example, places a series of intelligent decoys that look and feel like real, valuable data. These span your production and backup environments, and if an attacker trips one, an alert signal will be sent.

Threatwise also incorporates artificial intelligence to deliver enhanced threat insights and security policies that help you act faster and keep pace with attackers. This real-time intelligence helps you to quickly tighten the perimeter, deploy evasive manoeuvres and secure the backups. With this type of proactive approach, you can detect attacks much sooner, minimising both recovery time and the amount of effort required to get back to business as usual. In addition, it integrates seamlessly with existing security toolsets to strengthen defences and provides an immutable copy of data as a failsafe.

Redefining data protection

The goal of a modern, effective data protection strategy should always be to lower the risk of downtime while enhancing resilience and speeding time to recovery. To do this, it is essential to adopt a unified data protection platform geared toward the hybrid world, with the capabilities necessary to protect your data and your business today and in the future. In addition, ransomware protection and recovery plans need to be aligned with strategic business capabilities, to ensure that the critical elements of your organisation receive the attention and protection they require.