Gartner Promotes the Need for Heightened Storage & Backup Security to Combat Ransomware

Gartner recently emphasized the need for much stricter security in a recent report, “Hype Cycle for Storage and Data Protection Technologies, 2022.” Gartner analyst Julia Palmer focused on emerging innovative storage and data protection technologies. She evaluated their business impact, reviewed their adoption rates and maturity levels, and recommended ways to build adaptable and future-ready storage, and data protection platforms to meet changing business needs.

Some of the high-level takeaways include:

• By 2025, 60% of all enterprises will require storage products to have integrated ransomware defense mechanisms, up from 10% in 2022.
• By 2026, large enterprises will triple their unstructured data capacity stored as file or object storage on-premises, at the edge or in the public cloud, compared to 2022.
• By 2025, 60% will implement at least one of the hybrid cloud architectures, from15% in 2022.
• By 2025, more than 40% of enterprise storage will be deployed at the edge, up from 15% in 2022.
• By 2025, 30% of external enterprise storage arrays deployed to support primary storage workloads will adopt nonvolatile memory express over fabrics, compared with fewer than 5% in 2021.

Clearly, the world of storage is in for yet another period of significant change. A boom in unstructured data storage, cloud storage, and edge storage will create unprecedented levels of cybersecurity risk. Hence, the storage and data protection market is evolving to address these challenges.

Palmer urged organizations to evaluate and implement such technologies copy data management, enterprise information archiving, and immutable data vault to improve resiliency and data protection, as well as distributed file systems and object storage. 

Cyberstorage

The category known as cyberstorage came in for particular attention. It is defined as a way to protect storage systems and data from ransomware attacks. It does so via a variety of early detection and attack blocking techniques. It also provides a way to speed recovery by using analytics to pinpoint how and when an attack started. Some vendors use a software-only approach to cyberstorage while others package it within an appliance.

The reason behind the drive to adopt this technology is obvious. Ransomware attacks are never out of the headlines. Cybercriminals are able to extort millions every week from their victims.

Palmer outlined one key area of weakness in existing cyberstorage options: “Although numerous solutions are available for endpoint protection, back-end protection largely fails due to a lack of solutions.”  

Gartner also pointed out that network-attached storage (NAS) and scale-out file system storage don’t provide sufficient protection from malicious deletion or encryption of data. Recommendations included: 

• The adoption of multi-faceted strategies to combat ransomware including endpoint protection, enterprise backup and data storage infrastructure detection and recovery solutions.
• Limiting or blocking an attack is a better approach than trying to recover from one after it has taken place.
• Cyberstorage solutions should not be viewed as an alternative to backup and disaster recovery (DR). Organizations need secure backups and comprehensive DR in addition to ransomware protection.

Solving the Cyberstorage Shortfall

Continuity’s StorageGuard fills a major gap in storage and backup infrastructure, ensuring they are not the weakest link in cybersecurity. StorageGuard provides a comprehensive approach to the scanning of data storage, storage management, and backup systems. How? In hunts down all vulnerabilities and security misconfigurations that may be present in storage and backup systems.

What most people don’t realize is that regular vulnerability scans and patch management systems focus mainly on applications and OSes. They don’t do a good job finding Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) and glaring security misconfigurations among backup and storage systems. StorageGuard is designed to address this failing. It offers enterprises complete visibility into storage and backup blind spots, automatically prioritizing the most urgent risks.

Read the full report:

‘Hype Cycle for Storage and Data Protection Technologies, 2022’: https://blocksandfiles.com/2022/08/12/gartner-storage-hype-cycle/