HPE, Scality & Veeam – The Best Alliance Against Ransomware

[PiotrDrag]

In November 2021 Scality announced that its ARTESCA object storage solution is qualified as Veeam Ready Object with Immutability. With this certification, both Scality solutions, ARTESCA and RING  are now ransomware protection-enabled.

Scality now provides ransomware protection through data immutability feature across both ARTESCA and RING solutions, giving customers the support, they need to safeguard their valuable data. Validated as Veeam Ready Object with Immutability, Scality RING and ARTESCA provide for air-gapped, tamper-proof backup data that stays immune to ransomware, offering a robust and swift recovery path in case of an attack.

HPE, as a strategic partner of both companies, has also recognized this as a valuable addition to its own offering, making it even more compelling for its customers who face fierce increase in ransomware attacks.

Why it’s so important?

Fighting ransomware and its outcome is getting more and more expensive with much higher impact on organizations. When it comes to ransomware risk, no one is immune, and everyone is a target. It’s not a matter of “if” but when. Ransomware volumes hit record highs in 2021, with every sector affected and no signs of slowing down. In fact, Gartner analysts predict that by 2025, at least 75% of IT organizations will face one or more attacks. Infrastructure and operations leaders responsible for data protection must evaluate new ransomware protection features as critical prerequisites when choosing backup platforms.

Worldwide damages from ransomware equaled to 20B USD in 2021 -  57X more than 2015¹ and the prediction is this number will be 10x higher in 10 years from now. Vast majority of the organizations that experience ransomware breach pay ransom². Average ransomware payment is 250,000 USD³. Every second an organization suffered from a ransomware attack⁴. It is estimated that there is a ransomware attack on a business every 11 seconds on average⁵. I think the picture has already been painted however it will get worse… much worse!

Organizations that are proactive about protection and well-prepared to recover know that a strong data backup plan is more important than ever, and S3 Object Lock functionality is the key. Object Lock assures the safety of the backup data by making it immutable (impossible to delete or modify) and, therefore, hardened to malicious encryption. When you restore from an immutable backup repository, recovery from an attack is swift and simple. It’s your insurance policy against ransomware. If you are in a situation facing an uneasy choice – either to pay ransom (and hope you will get your data back) or to lose the encrypted data. With S3 Object Lock you have a third choice now.

The solution

In other words what organizations need today is air-gapped, tamper-proof backup of their data that stays immutable to ransomware and it’s available on the market today!  Scality RING and now Scality ARTESCA offers enhanced ransomware protection with support for Amazon S3 Object Lock API, which renders data immutable by preventing it from being deleted or overwritten for a period of time (or indefinitely), thereby preventing ransomware attacks. Qualified as Veeam Ready Object with Immutability, Scality RING and ARTESCA provide for air-gapped, tamper-proof backup data that stays immune to ransomware, offering a robust and swift recovery path in case of an attack.

Scality's highly durable storage deployed on HPE x86 servers is a scalable, cost-effective, and pre-validated solution that gives customers flexibility as it can start as small as a single node and scale to exabytes. For channel partners, certification of ARTESCA brings even more opportunity to provide a proven, repeatable solution to a broader end-user’ audience. On top of it Scality provides unlimited linear scale, 14×9s of durability, 100% availability, and low TCO — no proprietary hardware platform lock-in required.

Still the greatest storage system is not enough. We need a data management system that will take care of our backup and recovery in case of successful ransomware attack. Super immunity against ransomware can be provided by Scality and Veeam. With Scality RING with S3 Object Lock as your backup repository for Veeam Backup & Replication, you get high speed, scalable and ransomware-immune data protection. The newly validated as Veeam Ready Object with Immutability, ARTESCA is a great choice for short-term backup copy and long-term offload. Customers get a packaged solution for data protection with immutability. This allows to keep the simplicity of all-in-one Veeam deployments with single physical Backup server running Windows and all Veeam functions, and single server ARTESCA repository.

Key capabilities of this solution are:

• S3 object lock ransomware protection (assured recovery from ransomware)
• Lightning-fast backup/restore: 10’s of TB per hour (which means low RTO)
• Ultra-reliable for long-term data (gives security, multi-tenancy, cloud data management)
• Never run out of space: scale-out as needed

The elements of the solution:

• VEEAM v11 with Enterprise license with 3, 4, or 5-year license
• ARTESCA with 1, 3, 4, or 5-year license
• Min. 1 HPE x86 server with 50, 100 or 150TB

 Veeam + ARTESCA deployment on HPE servers

You are not confined to one data center. Multi-site deployments are fully supported and give another layer of security.

 Multi-site options

All the configuration and compatibility details of verified object storage solutions that has been tested with Veeam Backup & Replication object storage and storage immutability features can be found here.

How to configure it in ARTESCA and Veeam

Now let’s how easy it is to configure S3 Object Lock in ARTESCA and Veeam.

First of all some basic assumptions proving that data is protected from malicious admin:

• Veeam uses S3 Object Lock “Compliance mode”
• Immutability can’t be turned off once it has been used
• Backups in immutable buckets can’t be deleted

Configure Immutability in a few clicks.

In ARTESCA:

• Choose the bucket with Object Lock
• Create prefix within bucket
• Select the option to make immutable
• Define immutable duration

In Veeam

Demo – online and live in Warsaw!

See Scality and Veeam's combined solution in action, and discover how easy it is to ensure your backup repo is immutable and ransomware-proof. Check this video for quick demo. For organization from Central&Eastern Europe there’s a unique opportunity to try this solution on its own in HPE Customer Engagement Center in Warsaw that can provide a demo environment both for Scality ARTESCA and RING with Veeam.

1. Cybersecurity Ventures
2. IDC's 2021 Ransomware Study: Where You Are Matters!”, Q2 2021 (IDC # US48093721, July 2021)
3. IDC's 2021 Ransomware Study: Where You Are Matters!”, Q2 2021 (IDC # US48093721, July 2021)
4. Cybereason A Global Study on Ransomware Business Impact
5. Cybereason A Global Study on Ransomware Business Impact