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Enterprise Strategy Group | Getting to the Bigger Truth™
ESG SHOWCASE
Enhanced Ransomware And Data Protection With Veeam And Pure Storage
By Christophe Bertrand, Senior Analyst;
and Monya Keane, Senior Research Analyst
APRIL 2021
Abstract
Ransomware attackers have increased the frequency of their assaults—sometimes targeting the backup infrastructure itself—making backup and recovery more vital than ever. That’s where the combination of the portfolios of Veeam software and Pure Storage can help. Together, they are delivering a fast, scalable, feature-rich solution for backup, recovery, and ransomware prevention and remediation.
Market Landscape
Among organizations surveyed by ESG, 15% say they can tolerate no downtime at all for their mission-critical applications. And 42% say their mission-critical applications must be back online in one hour or less (see Figure 1).1 RTO is of the essence. Similarly, on the RPO front, 90% cannot tolerate more than one hour of lost “mission-critical” data (RPO<1hr).2
Figure 1. Downtime Tolerance
Source: Enterprise Strategy Group
During the current health crisis, protecting data became especially vital as organizations started experiencing more frequent cyberattacks. In fact, maintaining cybersecurity continues to be the top IT pain-point related to supporting work-from-home employees.3 That situation is in part the reason why 26% of IT managers surveyed by ESG also report that their organizations will be spending more on data protection going forward.4
Nearly half of organizations see fortifying cybersecurity as a business issue driving technology spending. More than one-third view either cybersecurity or public cloud usage as their top IT priority for 2021.5 They are also updating their BC/DR plans to include processes and protocols in the event of a future mass work-from-home mandate. Updating BC/DR plans represents the number-two priority for IT organizations in regard to supporting return-to-office transition efforts.6
They need a modern backup solution—one that is simple, highly scalable, and highly performant to deliver on data protection SLAs. Of course, it also needs to address recoverability needs, especially ransomware remediation.
Partnering for Fast, Secure, and Reliable Data Protection: Veeam’s Integration With Pure
Pure Storage and Veeam are both leaders in their respective segments of the IT industry. Both vendors have put great effort into integrating their portfolios through a variety of mechanisms (see Table 1).
Table 1. Veeam Integration Capabilities and Benefits with Pure Storage
| Integration/Capability | Benefits |
|---|---|
| Backup from storage snapshot (FlashArrayC//; FlashBlade) |
|
| Veeam Explorers for Storage Snapshots |
|
| On-demand Sandbox for Storage Snapshots |
|
| Primary Snapshot Orchestration |
|
Source: Enterprise Strategy Group
The Veeam and Pure Combination
The combined Veeam/Pure solution offers a couple of options based on which Pure Storage system an organization chooses to use:
• For cost and scale, organizations can leverage the new Pure FlashArray//C as a backup target. In fact, Pure is specifically targeting the new FA//C-40 with Veeam as a low-cost backup target.
• For higher recovery speeds and/or support of mission-critical applications, organizations can opt for FlashArray//X or the FlashBlade array family.
Veeam software manages the instant point-in-time snapshots through advanced API integrations with the Pure portfolio to provide RPO optimization and virtual full backups. Veeam delivers many recovery capabilities, with attractive features such as Veeam Instant Recovery and particular support for cyber resilience (see Table 2).
Table 2. Highlights of the Veeam and Pure Storage Combined Solution
| Veeam Software | FlashArray//C as a backup target | FlashBlade Rapid Restore |
|---|---|---|
| Instant point-in-time snapshots | • Lowest $/GB option | • Protects mission-critical applications with even faster recoveries |
| Fastest recovery option | • Veeam virtual full backups • SafeMode ransomware protection |
• SafeMode ransomware protection |
| Managed by Veeam | • Veeam Instant Recovery | • Veeam Instant Recovery |
Source: Enterprise Strategy Group
Taking a Closer Look at the Pure Storage FlashArray//C
Most business-critical applications require high-performance all-flash storage arrays, which is where Pure has innovated in the past few years, combining performance with simplicity. However, more “capacity-oriented” applications can continue to suffer from management-related complexities, inconsistent performance, and a lack of modern data services seen in some hybrid flash and legacy disk systems.
The FlashArray//C, an all-QLC system, could be the solution to that problem (see Figure 2). It provides a strong foundation for capacity-oriented applications, test and development workloads, multisite disaster recovery, and data protection with hybrid storage economics, making it a perfect candidate for disaster recovery and other scale-focused use cases. It can provide snapshots as well as synchronous (ActiveCluster) and asynchronous (ActiveDR) replication by leveraging features of Pure’s FlashArray//X performance storage.
This array is easily manageable with the cloud-based Pure1 platform, which is a feature-rich management solution that includes complete analytics, AI, and access to all data services required to optimize a modern storage solution. It is also available with the Pure Evergreen storage subscription model, which allows IT to upgrade performance, capacity, and features over time without requiring any disruptions to uptime.
Figure 2. The Veeam and Pure Storage Solution
Sources: Pure Storage and Veeam
The result: IT is able to protect business-critical applications, achieve great RPOs and RTOs, and optimize the secondary storage to balance capacity and performance."
The result: IT is able to protect business-critical applications, achieve great RPOs and RTOs, and optimize the secondary storage to balance capacity and performance. At a business-value level, that means IT will be able to lower costs, boost operational efficiency, deliver on their data protection KPIs, and rapidly recover and repurpose backup data (with FlashArray//C, FlashBlade, and Veeam).
And most importantly, you can create immutable snapshots with Pure SafeMode snapshots to protect the Veeam backup repository from being vulnerable to ransomware attacks.
Partnering to Fight Ransomware Attacks
Ransomware protection goes beyond traditional backup and recovery. Ransomware is a newer type of attack that tends to occur more frequently than traditional outage events do. The backup data must remain unadulterated. Maintaining recovery-point actuals and recovery-time actuals is key. Time equals money, and for any IT group that is trying to protect the rest of the organization from ransomware, practice and preparation make perfect.
Veeam and Pure have partnered to develop a solution that possesses these key features:
• Lowest RPOs with all-flash production.
• Rapid recovery with flash secondary storage.
• Immutable snapshots to protect backup repositories — available for FlashBlade and FlashArray.
• Assurance that backups have not been altered: cyber attackers can’t “go after the backups.”
Full Veeam Data Labs Capabilities
To guarantee recoverability of data, Veeam Backup & Replication complements Veeam’s SureBackup recovery verification technology with SureReplica. IT can use the SureBackup and SureReplica offerings to validate backups and replicas for consistency. Additionally, IT gets an on-demand virtual sandbox environment that is great for performing vulnerability assessments and forensics.
Another offering, SecureRestore, enables IT to scan backups to check for viruses before doing a restore. If an infection is detected, IT can cancel the restore operation. They also can restore virtual machines in safe mode.
The Bigger Truth
Cybersecurity and cyber resilience are closely associated. This combined architecture provides the building blocks of cyber resilience. Today, everyone needs good data protection, specifically an environment they can recover quickly and confidently. But just as important is gaining the added benefit related to recovery from ransomware. You really want to be prepared when (not if) the next ransomware attack happens.
Not only is Veeam protecting business-critical applications and the FlashStack, it is also now supporting the new Pure FlashArray//C capacity-optimized storage. This is the best of both worlds: flash secondary storage at a decent price point that scales well.
Those qualities lend themselves particularly well to the ransomware use case. Because Veeam backs up the data on a flash array, it is easier to create immutable snapshots and gain a truly protected backup copy for recovery after a ransomware attack.
Just as companies perform DR testing, they should also conduct ransomware-recovery testing. Through a combination of that type of testing plus usage of the right protection solutions, IT will not only have confidence that they have an “unpirated” backup environment, but they can also create backups quickly from flash storage to flash storage. That makes it a lot easier to keep the whole business up and running.
Identify and protect yourself against ransomware
This ESG Showcase was commissioned by Veeam and is distributed under license from ESG.
1 Source: ESG Master Survey Results, Real-world SLAs and Availability Requirements, Aug 2020.
2 ibid.
3 Source: ESG Research Report, 2021 Technology Spending Intentions Survey, Jan 2021.
4 Source: ESG Master Survey Results, Technology Impact of COVID-19: IT Decision Maker (ITDM) View, May 2020.
5 Source: ESG Research Report, 2021 Technology Spending Intentions Survey, Jan 2021.
2 ibid.
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Enterprise Strategy Group | Getting to the Bigger Truth™
Enterprise Strategy Group is an IT analyst, research, validation, and strategy firm that provides market intelligence and actionable insight to the global IT community.