Immutable Backup

What is an immutable backup?

Immutable Backup: Why it’s Paramount for Cyber Resilience in 2024 

Embedding immutable backup into your cybersecurity strategy protects data from myriad threats including malware, ransomware, data corruption, data deletion, equipment malfunction, and human error. 
 
In the face of an ever-evolving threat landscape, enterprise businesses must find ways to protect company, customer, employee, and partner data at all costs. While there is no guarantee that bad actors won’t gain access to environments – via phishing, malware, ransomware, or countless other approaches – immutable backups will protect data and secure it from malicious tampering. 
 
There is a difference between mutable and immutable infrastructure when considering data protection. Mutable infrastructure is flexible, allowing for updates and integrations to be made quickly. But in some scenarios, a mutable approach makes it easier for cybercriminals to access and manipulate data. Bad actors targeting businesses through data breaches can cause significant reputational damage, loss of revenue, and even legal consequences. And then there are immutable backups.  
 
An immutable backup is a file that cannot be altered in any way, designed so the data remains unchanged by either bad actors or administrators. Immutable backups also prevent data being deleted. Immutable backups protect against natural disasters and human error, but more importantly an immutable backup provides confidence that even if an environment is compromised, the data will remain secure.  
 
Immutable backups cannot be modified, but they cannot be protected from physical damage. If the physical medium housing the backup is damaged or destroyed, the backup will not remain intact. But in the face of malicious attacks, the data will be protected. 
 
That’s why immutable backups should be part of any cyber resilience strategy that enables businesses to stave off attacks and recover quickly when an organization does suffer an attack. Organizations need an immutable strategy to keep data safe and secure and, more importantly, ready whenever they need to restore it. Immutability is a proven technique used to reduce cyberattacks on backup data and help prevent changes to backup copies. 

benefits

The Business Benefits of Immutability 

Immutable backups can provide businesses with confidence their data will remain unchanged in the face of natural disasters or manmade malicious attacks.  
 
The benefits go further than that when considering the speed to recovery digital businesses need in today’s modern economy. Immutable backups provide: 
 
• Reliable disaster recovery 

• Historical data preservation 

• Reduced data loss 

• Effective data restoration 

• Mitigated impacts from attacks 
 
But one of the biggest benefits of immutable backups is how quickly a business can recover its data following an attack. With worries ranging from natural disasters to ransomware attacks, businesses can leverage immutable backups to restore data and mitigate damage from attacks.  
 
Immutable backups also help business leaders increase the speed of recovery time objective, or RTO, which is the targeted duration of time between the event of a failure and the point at which operations resume.  
 
Another key metric, recovery point objective, or RPO, also will improve with immutable backups. RPO is the maximum length of time permitted from which data can be restored. The difference between the two can be explained as RPO is the time from the last data backup until an incident occurred and RTO is the time businesses set to recover the lost data.  
 
Such granular details are critical when it comes to compliance with regulatory standards. Immutable storage is essential for any organization to protect its business-critical or private data. This is especially important for industries like healthcare, finance, and law, which have strict legal and regulatory requirements to safeguard sensitive data from unauthorized access or tampering.  
 
Immutable storage helps organizations comply with requirements like those put forth by the SEC, CFTC, and FINRA related to the recording, storage, and retention of electronic records and facilitates recovery in case of data loss or corruption. 
 
Immutable backup enables organizations to remain compliant with data protections and prevent data loss for customers, partners, and employees.  

recovery

Immutable Cloud Recovery

Businesses often think their data is secure, backed up, and recoverable – when it’s not. Organizations create volumes of data distributed across clouds, regions, applications, and partners. This brings a complexity that poses a significant challenge to cyber resilience. Backup and recovery strategies benefit from cloud delivery models. SaaS-delivery protections can restore data, minimize downtime, and scale easily.  
 
SaaS-delivered protection can create secondary data copies in resilient, immutable, and isolated cloud storage. This approach enables data to remain unchangeable, isolated, and swiftly retrievable in the unfortunate event of a ransomware attack.  
 
Coupling immutable backup with air gap ransomware protection provides an additional layer of security by creating a physical or logical separation between production data and backup data. This makes it more difficult for ransomware to spread to backups and provides confidence a clean copy of data is available for recovery. 
 
Data loss can occur for various reasons, including hardware failure, software corruption, human error, and ransomware attacks. If businesses invest in immutable backup, they can retain valuable data and eliminate significant downtime, saving time and money. Immutable backups will reduce and can help minimize data loss, enabling businesses to recover operations and protect customers.  
 
For business and security leaders, it’s essential to make data security and protection part of the planning process for all new applications, including identifying what data needs to be backed up, how often it is required, and where the backups will be stored. Businesses also should invest in a reliable backup solution designed for hybrid clouds.  
 
Backups are often an afterthought, done only when necessary. In today’s digital world, where data is essential to the success of any business, immutable backups should be a critical part of any cyber resilience strategy for business continuity.  
  
 

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