Essential Data Protection Strategies for Data Centers

For years, data protection was often seen as an insurance policy by IT leaders—they understood its necessity but were reluctant to invest significant time, money, or effort into it.

Today, cyber threats have become so widespread that data protection is now essential for businesses. As threats like ransomware continue to evolve, data protection strategies must adapt accordingly. Here are three tools and best practices that IT leaders should explore to secure their environments.

Safety Net: Immutable and Indelible Backups

Immutable backups cannot be altered, deleted, or overwritten by external forces; even if someone attempts to access the storage, the data remains secure. However, if an attacker breaches the data protection solution, backups can be compromised. Indelible backups go further by ensuring backups cannot be modified, deleted, or overwritten externally or internally within the data protection solution until the data expires.

Here's why immutable and indelible backups are crucial: When an organization suffers from ransomware, IT leaders rely on backups to recover the affected data, avoiding ransom payments. Attackers understand that backups serve as a safety net for organizations, so they actively attempt to delete or lock away backup data.

Indelible and immutable backups play a vital role in safeguarding backup environments, enabling organizations to restore their systems and data following an attack.

Alertor: Active Directory Threat Protection

On average, once infiltrating an organization's networks, malicious actors remain undetected for approximately 200 days before taking action. This extended period allows them to thoroughly explore the environment and strategize how to disrupt the organization's systems. There's a growing trend where hackers target organizations' Active Directory environments, leveraging compromised credentials to execute unauthorized changes.

Even if an organization maintains indelible and immutable backups, attackers can still compromise Active Directory by acquiring elevated credentials. In such scenarios, organizations risk restoring an Active Directory that includes unauthorized accounts, or they may need to rebuild it entirely from scratch. This underscores the critical importance of Active Directory threat detection, response, and recovery measures.

The Last Line of Defense: Segregated Data Backup Environments

Backup environments have now risen to the status of a Tier 0 application for businesses. Serving as the final defense against ransomware attacks, backups should possess their own isolated vault copy, login credentials, and multifactor authentication solutions. This segregation makes it significantly harder for hackers to block an organization's access to its data because breaching both production and isolated backup systems is required. If attackers compromise the production environment but fail to access the isolated backup system, the organization can rely on up-to-date backups to restore their data.

In our engagements with organizations, leaders often anticipate being able to fully restore their environments within 24 hours following a cyberattack, akin to recovering from a natural disaster. However, we emphasize that the average recovery time after a breach is 21 days. Cyberattacks necessitate extensive recovery processes not typically required in natural disaster scenarios. Rather than reacting post-attack, business and IT leaders benefit greatly from prioritizing these preventive measures and best practices.

The Best Choice for Securing Your Data: PicOS® Switches

Cyber threats are constantly changing and evolving, and data protection must evolve as well. As a professional communications equipment and solutions provider, FS is committed to providing high-performance data center switches and a dedicated team of modern solutions. FS PicOS® switches are comprehensive security solutions that protect your network from unauthorized access and ensure that all users and devices are strictly authenticated and authorized before gaining access to network resources, even internal users and devices.

So you need robust security solutions, including network access control (NAC) and virtual private networks (VPNs), as well as wireless networks. PicOS® interoperates with solutions from major vendors, including Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), Aruba ClearPass, the open-source PacketFence project, and any wireless network vendor's access Point (AP). PicOS® switches provide technical support for data protection:

• A comprehensive security mechanism supports: security measures from physical interfaces to application levels, reducing the risk of security accidents.

• Strict implementation of the Zero Trust Principle: Strengthen network security through tight integration with leading Network Access Control (NAC) policy managers to support a comprehensive set of security mechanisms to protect the access layer that provides the zero trust principle.

FS is excited to help customers understand how FS PicOS® switches can promise a more flexible, supported, and resilient networking solution. We encourage customers to explore the benefits tailored to their specific network needs. If you demand high network performance, enhanced security, streamlined operations, and cost-effectiveness, start with FS PicOS® switches to experience a new era of connectivity.