Kate Mollett, regional director for Commvault Africa.

Data is everywhere, and the size and scale of data that now resides outside of a company’s data centre and/or private cloud is massive. This includes critical data that organisations rely on for day-to-day operations, and this data is under attack from ever more sophisticated threat vectors that are increasingly costly and damaging. Backup remains essential as a last resort for recovery, and it needs to be secured. However, in today's world, organisations must adopt a more active approach to data protection, spanning from backup to production, covering on-premise and cloud environments. The objective of this approach is to identify and neutralise threats earlier, thereby mitigating both the risk and the potential damage caused.

AI is smarter and faster – and threat actors use it too

Data is increasingly being not only stored, but also created and processed outside of traditional data centres and even the cloud. The value of this data is innumerable – without it, businesses cannot function. As a result, it is an increasingly attractive target for malicious actors, who can sell this data on the dark Web – and it is not just the ‘crown jewels’ so to speak, the financial, personal and accounts information that is under threat. We are also seeing increasing breaches of corporate and supply chain data in the backup and recovery environment.

At the same time, the speed of attack is increasing, the dwell time between a breach and data exfiltration is decreasing, and organisations now have a matter of mere hours to identify and shut down a breach before it can cause serious harm. This is because the same Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) tools that organisations are using to make their business smarter and faster are also available to threat actors, who use them to make threats smarter and faster. In addition, the sophisticated encryption tools businesses use to protect data are also being used by bad actors to lock organisations out of their data, and they are virtually impossible to break. The lifecycle of an attack is so compressed that there is little opportunity to detect a threat, and the damage can be crippling unless you adopt an active defence strategy.

See the threat sooner to respond faster

The demand is now firmly on the backup and recovery team to see the threat sooner and respond with greater speed and accuracy. Anomaly detection and air-gapped, immutable backups, while they remain critical, are simply no longer enough – if your entire strategy rests on the recovery of your last backup, and this backup has been encrypted, then you are lost.

Businesses today need an active defence strategy with an intelligent data protection solution covering three pillars: secure, defend and recover. To secure and recover, you need broad workload coverage regardless of where they reside. To defend, you need to be able to detect threats within minutes of them entering the environment to limit the damage an attack can do. To recover, you need leading data protection at the core for fast, agile data recovery.

Commvault offers a comprehensive solution across all these areas and removes the challenge of a single point of failure, with broad, bi-directional integration into a large variety of leading cloud and on-prem solutions for stronger layering of security. Cloud-based data protection incorporates Threatwise, an early warning cyber deception solution, layered with Threatscan to offer real-time visibility into environments, rapid detection of potential threats, and an improved recovery time objective. Commvault also offers a risk analysis to help organisations determine gaps in their strategy and solutions, classify sensitive data, understand its exposure and enable remediation.

Immutable, air-gapped cloud storage, still the foundation of a sound data protection strategy, remains the core of Commvault, and is now augmented with next-generation toolsets and functionality. With a single tool taking you beyond backup, you can leverage simplified management and a single pane of glass for a powerful, intelligent picture of data protection to meet evolving data challenges.