In today’s digital landscape, where cyberthreats pose a significant threat and unforeseen disasters can strike at any moment, ensuring the security and integrity of your data is crucial. But what exactly is an immutable backup, and why is it so important?
What is immutable backup?
Immutable backup, simply put, means data that is incapable of being changed or altered. It serves as a safeguard against various threats, including ransomware attacks, malware, viruses, equipment malfunctions, human errors, and natural disasters. An immutable backup is a way of protecting data that ensures the data is fixed, unchangeable, encrypted, or unable to be modified.
The significance of immutability cannot be overstated, especially when considering the prevalence of ransomware attacks. Such attacks can take months for businesses to recover from. In a ransomware attack, an organization’s data or systems are encrypted by an attacker and a ransom is demanded before the organization can regain control of its data. What’s worse, traditional backup and recovery systems are often targeted by cybercriminals, leaving organizations vulnerable even in their supposed safety nets.
Immutable backups offer a critical defense against ransomware, ensuring that your data remains resistant to both internal and external threats. It can be accessed any number of times but cannot under any circumstances be written over. In the event of data loss, immutable backups enable swift and seamless restoration, minimizing downtime and facilitating the quick resumption of business operations. The benefits of implementing immutable backups include enhanced data protection, rapid recovery in the event of data loss, peace of mind, meeting compliance and legal requirements, and digital evidence preservation.
How does immutable backup work?
So, how do immutable backups function? When establishing an immutable backup, a pivotal step involves instituting an “object lock” on the data. This lock ensures the data remains unaltered for a specified duration, determined by the user initiating the backup. Throughout this timeframe, the data remains inaccessible but is shielded from any attempts at manipulation or deletion. Upon the lock’s scheduled expiration, the backup is no longer immutable. While it’s possible to make a backup immutable indefinitely, it’s not typical because every organization’s data changes over time. Therefore, periodic replacement of the backup with a new immutable record is necessary to ensure it remains up to date and adequately protected.
Aunalytics Immutable Backup Solution
At Aunalytics, our immutable cloud backup solution ensures that backup storage repositories in the Aunalytics Cloud cannot be deleted or modified, providing robust protection for your data. A secondary repository that allows for object locking is created within the Aunalytics Cloud tenant portal to the specifications of the customer. The customer creates backup jobs for this repository, and schedules them as they see fit. As the need for storage increases (or decreases), the environment will grow with it.
If the customer is also utilizing Aunalytics Managed Services for their servers, the Managed Service Team (Centralized Services) will manage these backups for the customer. At Aunalytics, safeguarding customer data is of the utmost importance. We uphold stringent measures to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of all data entrusted to us. Our commitment to data protection is not just a policy—it’s a culture woven into every aspect of our operations, fostering trust and reliability among our valued customers.
