As the costs of downtime soar, it is crucial for organisations to have the ability to get business back up and running in a matter of minutes or seconds. However, traditional backups could be corrupted or take weeks to restore.
This is according to speakers at a webinar on business resilience presented by systems integrator NEC XON, HPE and Cohesity, in partnership with ITWeb.
John Dewar, General Manager: Enterprise Technology Solutions at NEC XON Group, said: “Downtime affects customers, revenue, service and the organisation’s reputation. When something happens unexpectedly, organisations need to get back to business as quickly as possible. The old question was ‘Do we have a backup?’, and the new business question is ‘How quickly can we get back to normal?’”
Dewar highlighted how the partnership between NEC XON, Cohesity and HPE Zerto improves business resilience through their complementary technologies and expertise.
“Zerto restores operations quickly and keeps important services available, and Cohesity keeps business data safe and helps protect and recover trusted data. NEC XON helps bring it all together for less disruption, faster recovery and greater confidence,” he said.
Ben Preston, Principal Solutions Architect – Alliances at Cohesity, explained how the Cohesity data cloud, underpinned by the Cohesity data platform, helps protect data.
“Customers want increased cyber resilience, rapid response and recovery, as well as a lower TCO for resilience and AI insights from their data. To help them achieve this, we developed a five-step model. The first step is to protect all data and give organisations visibility into it, so they can properly identify and govern all data, enhance security, reduce risk, improve compliance and lower costs,” he said.
“Step two is ensuring that backups are always recoverable. The Cohesity data cloud ensures immutability, MFA, separation of duties, RBAC, 3-2-1-1, threat containment and data lock for faster and more secure recovery, audit readiness and zero trust alignment.”
The third step is to detect and investigate threats. Preston said: “We regularly conduct threat scanning and threat hunting with automatic and on-demand scanning, AI-powered anomaly detection, threat intelligence, hash index and forensics for early threat detection and mitigation, and backup integrity assurance. The platform is extensible and integrates into your environment, with shared context for IT and InfoSec teams.”
Step four encompasses preparation, practice and recovery. Preston outlined Cohesity’s capabilities, including a digital ‘jump bag’ with immutable, clean copies of whatever is needed to restore minimum viable business, for faster and safer recovery, improved RTO, lower risk of reinfection and reduced disruption and financial risk.
The fifth step is reducing risk: “We can assess incident impact, trigger classification scans and identify unprotected critical data for enhanced data visibility and classification and proactive risk mitigation,” he said.
Michael Murphy, Cyber Recovery Specialist at HPE MEA, noted that many businesses confuse disaster recovery with backup or high availability.
He said: “The critical applications your business runs on need rapid disaster recovery. Zerto isn’t just another backup solution – we are a complementary solution focused on very fast recovery for the applications that have the biggest impact on the business. Zerto is the leader in continuous data protection – it replicates data in your environment continuously to various data locations, with no impact on performance. It also carries out real time detection of ransomware, so organisations can identify the last clean copy.”
He noted that Zerto is not used only for protection against attacks. “In South Africa, it is also used quite extensively in migrations,” he said.
Murphy added: “There is growing pressure to prove resilience. With Zerto, you can do non-disruptive DR testing during the day, and even test complete failovers, and produce reports demonstrating your recovery time objectives.”
Cohesity and Zerto will host roundtable events to showcase their combined ability to deliver continuous data protection and help prevent operational downtime. Their Beyond Backup and Recovery roundtables will be held in Johannesburg on 29 September and Cape Town on 1 October. For more information, visit:
https://events.cohesity.com/beyond-backup-and-recovery-johannesburg?gz=none [events.cohesity.com]
https://events.cohesity.com/beyond-backup-and-recovery-cape-town?gz=none [events.cohesity.com]
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