Ransomware, inadvertent clicks on malicious emails, a disgruntled employee looking to sabotage your company—all put your business at risk. Cybersecurity solutions provide protection against them and the costly disruptions they create. But, there’s an alternative approach that can augment your data-protection strategy and the infrastructure you already have. It’s called “safer data” and it provides the last line of defence if all your existing security solutions are compromised.
As cyberattacks become more prevalent, every organization needs a way to recover if an attack occurs. Pure Storage® FlashBlade® delivers on this safer-data promise. FlashBlade isn’t a backup appliance; it’s a unified fast file and object storage platform. It supports workloads such as analytics and AI by consolidating both object and file storage in one solution. It also has two key capabilities that make it a perfect choice as the last line of defence for your data. SafeMode™ snapshot backups:
- Can’t be compromised by ransomware or even a rogue employee with administrator rights
- Have blisteringly fast restore and data recovery speeds of up to 270TB per hour
Where Does FlashBlade Play?
When we talk to organisations about FlashBlade, one of their main concerns is how to incorporate it into their infrastructure without having to rip and replace existing storage and backup systems. That’s exactly what we’ll outline below. We’ll show you a practical, real-world example of how you can incorporate FlashBlade within existing storage and backup processes to augment your existing infrastructure.
There are three stages when looking at FlashBlade as a path to safer data:
- Before an attack: FlashBlade is simple to implement within an existing environment, adding another layer of defence to your overall cybersecurity strategy.
- During an attack: SafeMode snapshots create immutable copies of data that can’t be deleted or compromised, even with admin credentials.
- After an attack: In the event you lose data, FlashBlade has an unmatched recovery speed so that you can rapidly restore it and be back in business quickly.
With FlashBlade, the conversation shifts:
- From “How are you protecting your mission-critical applications?” to “Do you have a cyberattack strategy?”
- From “What are your backup SLAs?” to “What are your restore SLAs?” and “Do you have a ransomware recovery strategy?”
With this in mind, here’s a sample architecture of how you can incorporate FlashBlade within an existing environment.
The core idea to note here is that FlashBlade doesn’t become your primary backup solution or replace your existing solutions. It’s an augmentation strategy. You would typically use it to back up data only over the previous 30 days or fewer on a rolling basis. It’s your most recent, mission-critical data that will help you recover from an attack.
It works natively with existing backup software, such as Veeam, Commvault, and Veritas. You would continue to use existing backup storage for data older than 30 days or non-mission-critical data.
With this ease of integration, organisations leverage FlashBlade for a variety of use cases, including:
- Augmenting existing longer-term data-retention processes with shorter-term backups
- Enabling rapid recovery of data with SafeMode snapshots following a malicious attack
- Directly protecting specific applications/databases
- Selectively protecting backup sets behind an existing backup solution
You can also implement FlashBlade slowly by starting with a smaller footprint of around 60TB of usable capacity (before deduplication). This allows you to test the capabilities on your most critical data, then consider where to scale.
And with the Pure Evergreen Storage™ subscription model, you can forget about expensive upgrade cycles, disruptive downtime, and rebuys of TBs you already own. You can reduce your storage TCO and save more than 50% versus traditional forklift upgrades.
Safer Data Realised
By enabling organisations to augment existing data backup infrastructure rather than replacing it, Pure FlashBlade enhances infrastructure already in place with additional data-loss prevention and cyber-protection features. Over time, you can extend the capabilities of FlashBlade to protect more of your infrastructure, without massive upheaval or significant investment.
