How to create a data fortress for protection against ransomware attacks
James Thorpe
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Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that Ransomware will cost its victims around $265 billion (USD) annually by 2031.
Businesses will face a new attack every two seconds as ransomware perpetrators progressively refine their malware payloads and related extortion activities. The data clearly suggests that it is not the question of if, but when a business is attacked by ransomware.
Shared storage has been an especially rich target for cybercriminals to hijack valuable customer, financial or sensitive information and extort payment in return for access to the data.
Hence, revving up ransomware defence is a top priority for CIOs and other business leaders who are actively looking for storage security strategies against malicious cyber-attacks.
Ransomware is a type of malware that attacks storage systems by encrypting user file shares and volumes. Victims are denied access to the encrypted data and make the data unrecoverable without paying a ransom for a decryption key.
There is substantial uncertainty that even if the ransom is paid, the data will be restored or that the attack is ended.
Ransomware attacks cannot be detected by antivirus software or firewalls and cause tremendous losses, including lost productivity costs, forensic investigation costs, data restoration costs from backup – not to mention the costs of hiring emergency consultants and crisis managers.
What businesses need is a cybersecurity and ransomware protection plan that is integrated with the storage system to detect, prevent, recover and analyse cyber-attacks so that structured and unstructured data is protected, no matter where the data resides.
The Nutanix Files software-defined storage solution has integrated ransomware protection to help customers secure unstructured data.
The latest version, Files 4.1, offers improved network isolation with network segmentation, better resource management with enhanced multi-network support, enhanced security with WORM support and ransomware detection.
When combined with the Nutanix Data Lens SaaS-based data management and governance application, Nutanix Files delivers a full spectrum of ransomware protection aligned to key defence-in-depth and critical cybersecurity initiatives like a Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) spanning the NIST Cybersecurity Frameworks of Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond and Recover.
By Tuhina Goel, Director of Product Marketing, Nutanix
