Whether you're in IT operations, site reliability, DevOps, or engineering, taking snapshots is a common practice in your Google Cloud environment. While they're easy to set up through the Google Cloud Console, relying solely on snapshots for data protection could leave you vulnerable to cyberattacks. That could mean weeks or even months of downtime.
The Google Cloud users and IT leaders responsible for maintaining business continuity need to recognize that thinking beyond snapshots is essential for building true cyber resilience for your Google Cloud data estate.
Immutability: Recover with Confidence
A snapshot-only recovery strategy lacks immutability and is vulnerable to modification, encryption, or complete deletion. Anyone with sufficient permissions can potentially alter or delete these snapshots, which raises a troubling question: How can you identify clean recovery points if your snapshots are compromised?
Unlike snapshots, Rubrik's backups are immutable by default. Rubrik’s architecture implements write-once-read-many (WORM) technology that prevents backup data from being modified or deleted, even by administrators. Once data is backed up by Rubrik, it becomes impossible to alter until its predefined retention period expires. With Rubrik, you can maintain absolute confidence in your recovery points, regardless of the method of attack. If you know the exact state of your systems at the time of backup, you can recover with confidence.
Protection from the Unseen Threat of Ransomware
Modern ransomware rarely strikes immediately. Instead, it often hides in your environment for weeks or months before activation. This dwell time creates a particularly dangerous scenario for snapshot-dependent recovery strategies, as your most recent snapshots may already contain this threat. Organizations frequently find themselves trapped in frustrating cycles of reinfection, as restoring from snapshots reintroduces the very threats they're attempting to eliminate.
Advanced data protection solutions like Rubrik incorporate machine learning and threat scanning algorithms that identify potential ransomware signatures within backup data itself, detecting suspicious encryption patterns or unusual activity. These capabilities provide early warning of potential infections and help you identify the last truly clean recovery point—a critical capability that snapshot-only approaches simply cannot provide.
The Rise of Credential Compromise
Cyber criminals aren't just deploying ransomware to encrypt your data, they are also hijacking administrator-level credentials through phishing, social engineering, or exploitation of vulnerabilities. This often means intruders can gain complete control over both your production data and your recovery means, effectively rendering recovery from snapshots impossible.
Unfortunately, organizations typically discover this vulnerability only when they attempt to recover from snapshots that have already been compromised or deleted entirely.
One of the most significant vulnerabilities in snapshot-based protection is the lack of separation between production environments and backup data. Rubrik can solve this by creating genuine logical air gaps between your Google Cloud production environment and backup storage with separate credentials. Even with compromised administrative credentials to your product environment, cyber criminals cannot gain access to your backups. This protection ensures recovery even during the most sophisticated attacks that compromise your Google Cloud administrator credentials.
Gaining Visibility
As your Google Cloud footprint grows across projects, regions, and departments, protection becomes harder to maintain. When teams independently create their own snapshots, you lose visibility into what's actually protected and the sensitivity of data, such as personally identifiable information (PII). This leads to inconsistent data protection, creating blind spots and gaps, which can often lead to extended downtime when disasters strike.
Rubrik provides centralized backup management through a single UI, giving you unified visibility across all your Google Cloud workloads, projects, and regions. You can monitor backup status, identify unprotected resources, and enforce consistent backup policies across your entire Google Cloud data estate. This comprehensive view eliminates blind spots and ensures nothing falls through the cracks.
A Holistic Approach to True Cyber Resilience
Relying on snapshots alone won’t protect you from these sophisticated cyber threats and will only leave your business-critical Google Cloud data vulnerable. True cyber resilience requires a multi-layered approach that combines immutable air-gapped backups, threat intelligence, and centralized visibility to ensure your data can be recovered safely from a known good point in time.
As cyber threats continue to evolve in both sophistication and frequency, the distinction between basic snapshot protection and true cyber resilience becomes increasingly crucial. Making informed decisions about your Google Cloud data protection strategy today can significantly impact your organization's ability to withstand and recover from tomorrow's threats.
Ready to learn more about Rubrik’s approach to Google Cloud backup and recovery? View our On-Demand Google Cloud Cyber Resilience Redefined Demo, where we'll show you how Rubrik's Cloud Native Protection for Google Cloud delivers true cyber resilience.
Any unreleased services or features referenced in this document are not currently available and may not be made generally available on time or at all, as may be determined in our sole discretion. Any such referenced services or features do not represent promises to deliver, commitments, or obligations of Rubrik, Inc. and may not be incorporated into any contract. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon services and features that are currently generally available.