Due to the proliferation of cloud-native environments, ransomware attacks have increased dramatically in recent years. Cybercriminals can access a variety of ransomware tools from anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice. This capability has produced an entire economy of Ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS). Despite significant investment in real-time infrastructure security tools, organizations are failing to quickly identify and recover from an attack. These cybersecurity breaches are highly complex and may occur over the course of weeks. Organizations that continue to invest in legacy backup and recovery tools are setting themselves up for failure because many of those tools are not built to mitigate attacks in the modern threat landscape.
It is common for organizations to invest significant resources in cyber threat detection, but they should not neglect the need for full data recovery in case their systems are accessed improperly. Continuity of service is of the utmost importance. The ability to detect threats while analyzing changes in data across time and the entire data structure is key to a robust recovery strategy.
Using a data observability solution, organizations can have backups that mirror the live data structure. These two datasets, together with machine learning and AI, can allow organizations to differentiate between good and bad or unexpected changes in data. This, in effect, turns a previously passive backup environment into a database that can be used to gain insights into how an organization is being attacked, where sensitive data resides, and how best to protect it from attackers. This process provides accelerated investigation and remediation capabilities. Organizations can now:
Identify where, when, and how cyberattacks have impacted systems identify the blast radius of an attack
Move or restrict access to data assets based on sensitivity and compliance needs
Use time-indexed backup snapshots to ensure restoration to a safe, uninfected system state in the event of an attack
Scan and analyze backup snapshots to detect anomalous behavior
What is Data Observability?
Data observability techniques and algorithms allow teams to know what data has been corrupted, deleted, or otherwise accessed improperly. Having quick and accurate information about risks and threats is critical to rapidly restoring systems to meet the response time objective.
Another key benefit of data observability is it enables organizations to reduce their overall data downtime. This is the amount of time an organization is unable to conduct business because its data is missing, erroneous, partial, or otherwise inaccurate. As cyber-attacks increase in frequency and sophistication, expected downtime may increase which can impact the bottom line, brand reputation, and trust with customers. Data observability allows much quicker incident response and remediation. Algorithms detect the last uninfected data snapshot and operations automatically return to an uninfected and functioning state, quickly.
Data Observability Improves Security Outcomes
Obtaining clear visibility into changes in data and network activity greatly improves an organization’s security capabilities by detecting anomalies and triggering automatic alerts. This boosts efficiency by drawing connections between similar anomalies and enabling swift action to close vulnerabilities. Traditional IT monitoring techniques may have left these vulnerabilities open if they were detected at all.
This continuous monitoring capability enables quick and efficient incident response, forensic and root cause analysis, and the creation of threat assessments to understand where attacks come from, how to stop them, and where critical network weaknesses reside.
Progress Brings New Challenges
The cloud is here to stay. Organizations need to know about the vulnerabilities that come with that and prepare for an attack so they don't have to pay the ransom – which can cost millions of dollars. Organizations require a comprehensive strategy to alleviate these concerns. Using the principles of data observability, Rubrik has developed these solutions to secure data and reduce business downtime.
Rubrik is already an industry leader in secure backup and recovery. Now, Rubrik is the pioneer of Zero Trust Data Security solutions that are enabling enterprises and government agencies to prepare for modern cybersecurity threats like ransomware with powerful data resilience, data observability, and data recovery capabilities within the Rubrik Security Cloud.
To learn more about how you can unlock visibility into your data with Rubrik Data Observability, watch Rubrik’s keynote presentation from FORWARD 2022.