Ransomware, human errors, and disasters are ongoing risks to your company’s most important asset: its data. Traditional backups, while necessary, are only sometimes adequate since ransomware can still infect them. That’s where immutable backups come in as an essential layer of protection. They assure that your vital information is safe and recoverable even if the worst happens. This essay covers the foundations of immutable backups, their benefits, and a step-by-step method for integrating them into your IT architecture.
Understanding Immutable Backups and Their Significance
Immutable backups are data copies that, once made, cannot be changed, or deleted for a specified length of time. Think of them as a highly secure digital vault. Immutable backups enforce this protection through technologies such as WORM (Write Once, Read Many) or object-locking in cloud systems, reminding you that data may be recovered even in the worst-case situation. Immutable backups also assist businesses in meeting data security compliance since they preserve accurate, unalterable records of critical information.
Immutable Backups vs. Traditional Backups
If your organization still depends entirely on traditional (mutable) backups, you are putting yourself at serious risk. Today’s cyberattacks are more sophisticated and devastating than ever. Traditional backups are subject to the same malware that targets your primary systems. If your network is infiltrated and infected, your backups may become compromised. Furthermore, human error remains an issue. Traditional backups can be mistakenly destroyed or manipulated, limiting your recovery options.
Finally, ransomware is a major problem; this dangerous software encrypts your data, rendering it inaccessible, and attackers demand payment in exchange for the decryption key. Traditional backups are prime targets for ransomware attacks because hackers understand their importance for recovery, giving you less leverage. Immutable backups directly address these issues by keeping your backups immutable and undeletable, assuring recovery even if an attack occurs.
The Benefits of Immutable Backups
While ransomware resistance is an important benefit, immutable backups add significantly more to your IT strategy:
- Forensic Analysis: Access to unmodified data is critical when dealing with security problems or legal disputes. Immutable backups maintain a chain of custody, assisting with investigating root causes, defining the scope of any breaches, and providing proof as needed.
- Data Corruption Prevention: Because they are immutable, they protect your backups against program failures, setup mistakes, and other challenges that traditional backups may encounter.
- Faster RTOs and shorter RPOs: Reduce downtime by swiftly restoring from immutable backups, allowing you to resume operations and retain more frequent recovery points.
- Data Integrity and Security: Immutable backups safeguard your data against unintentional and malicious change, ensuring its accuracy and safety.
- Regulatory Compliance: Many regulations, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and others, mandate specific data retention durations and emphasize data integrity. Immutable backups assist in verifying that your data is unalterable and safely stored for the required period, enabling compliance audits, and reducing the danger of costly fines.
The Power of Integrating Immutable and Traditional Backups
Adding immutability to your current backup strategy improves your chances of a successful recovery in the case of an attack or incident. Object First’s recovery capabilities offer numerous methods for implementing immutable backups:
- Two-Tiered Protection: Use immutable and traditional backups to create a comprehensive plan. Immutable backups can become your first line of defense for vital data, but standard backups may be used as a backup alternative for less sensitive datasets or development settings.
- Choosing Your Immutable Strategy: Object First works smoothly with object storage targets that support object locking and versioning, such as AWS S3, Wasabi, and Minio. Using the best storage for Veeam, you can easily configure object locking, which protects your backups from alteration or deletion. Object locking is typically divided into two modes, which are outlined below:
- Governance Mode: Objects in Governance Mode are immutable until they reach the retention date unless a user has particular IAM capabilities to change the settings.
- Compliance Mode: Objects placed in Compliance Mode are immutable until they reach the maintenance date. This cannot be reversed for any reason by any user, regardless of their permissions. We strongly recommend that you configure your buckets in Compliance mode, unless you want someone with the appropriate permissions to remove or change the expiration date of the backups. Compliance mode ensures backups cannot be destroyed, encrypted, or corrupted. The only method to delete them is to delete the entire account.
- Object First provides a variety of immutable backup alternatives, allowing you to choose what best fits your infrastructure and needs:
- Flexible Increments: While regular Object First backups allow you to create an unlimited chain of incremental backups, immutable backups require a slightly different technique. This makes the best use of your immutable storage.
- Automated Retention and Deletion: Object First uses the ‘put-object-retention’ API to set the ‘RetainUntilDate’ on backups, ensuring they are retained for the period specified in your policy. Object First does not delete backups; instead, it relies on your chosen S3 bucket retention policies to perform automatic and secure destruction on your specified timetable. This connection facilitates your immutable backup process.
How to Start with Immutable Backups
While the mechanics of setting up immutable backups vary depending on your selected technologies and architecture, here’s an overview of the stages involved:
- Choose your storage: Consider on-premises vs. cloud, preferred vendors, and compatibility with existing infrastructure. You might use specialized hardware such as a hardened repository, an on-premises object storage system, or a cloud provider with object-locking capabilities. Object First’s comprehensive support for multiple storage alternatives and ease of integration will help you make an informed decision while ensuring compatibility with your selected storage type and provider.
- Set retention policies: Decide how long to store immutable backups, aiming for a balance that supports your recovery scenarios while minimizing storage costs. Consider the importance of your data, any regulatory obligations, and how far back you may need to restore in case of an incident or assault.
- Implement security measures: Protecting your immutable backups is critical. Integrate in-flight and at-rest encryption and implement substantial access restrictions using role-based permissions and multi-factor authentication. Regular auditing of access records can aid in detecting any questionable activity.
- Prioritize interoperability: Look for solutions that complement your present hardware and the various application environments you employ (from classic virtual machines to Kubernetes).
- Test and document: Your immutable backup and recovery mechanisms must be well-tested. Simulate multiple failure situations to confirm that your backups perform as planned and that your recovery times are consistent with your disaster recovery objectives. Create and routinely update accurate documentation of your procedures, which will be an essential component of your entire disaster recovery strategy.
Immutable backups are no longer a luxury; they are essential to a resilient IT strategy. They reduce the danger of ransomware, maintain compliance, and allow for speedy catastrophe recovery. Understanding the concepts of immutability and carefully planning implementation protects the organization’s essential data while also increasing trust in its resiliency.
Conclusion
Immutable backups are an essential component of any complete data protection strategy. Organizations may protect their critical information from various dangers by ensuring that backup data cannot be manipulated, erased, or distorted. Immutable backups are essential and beneficial for more than just security; they can save money, simplify management, increase compliance, and provide peace of mind.
Implementing immutable backups necessitates careful design, appropriate technology, and continual maintenance. Following the techniques provided in this book, organizations can successfully include immutable backups into their data protection strategy, ensuring vital data integrity and availability.
The benefits of immutable backups provide a solid solution for ensuring that data stays secure, dependable, and recoverable in an era where data is valuable and cyber threats are ubiquitous. Investing in immutable backup solutions is more than a best practice; it is a requirement for organizations that want to secure their data and sustain business continuity.
