By Jim Klossner, Senior Director, Product Management and Software Development, Think On Inc.
This is Part Two of our blog series on ThinkOn Object Storage—a deep dive into the value of immutable backup in object storage for critical data. Part One, “The Big Data Challenge: Turning Capacity Headaches into Business Value”, focuses on solutions to the challenges of big data management and security.
When you have a valuable asset, you don’t leave it lying around where anyone can take it. You lock it up and make sure it’s stored in a secure facility; that’s just common sense. But what’s the point of having something if you can’t use it?
In a museum or art gallery, the most precious objects are stored behind glass, cordoned off, and secured in place. The exhibits are protected, but patrons can still examine the pieces to glean insights into the stories these objects have to tell. The idea is to ensure that once an asset is secured, it’s not going anywhere, and it can’t be damaged, but it can still be accessed within limits.
In the new digital reality, data—and the insights it provides—is an organization’s greatest asset, but with rising levels of cybercrime, the staggering amount of data we collect, and rapidly changing regulatory requirements, protecting sensitive data is a challenge.
Data security: The key is immutability
The best way to secure data from cyberattack, human error, or corruption is to lock it away, making it immutable and therefore safe from potential changes or deletions. ThinkOn’s Object Storage allows for Object Lock to be enabled as part of its security features. It’s like a secure facility for your most sensitive data.
Quite simply, with Object Lock making the storage immutable, your data cannot be destroyed. This ensures that your data is secure and compliant, its original integrity protected. The challenge then becomes, how do you leverage the power of your data if you can’t access it? ThinkOn solutions are designed to lock away sensitive data without cutting off its power to transform business by providing data insights.
So, your data remains dynamic without escalating costs or incurring massive egress fees. That’s a huge advantage for organizations that want to ensure security and compliance while leveraging the power of their data to transform their business.
Lock them up, or lock them out
No organization can survive today without a digital footprint, and no online exposure is safe without rigorous protection from cyberattack. Malicious viruses and ransomware attacks continue to aggressively ravage businesses and public service entities, including hospitals and charities.
“Cybersecurity Ventures predicts ransomware will cost its victims around $265 billion USD annually by 2031,” says Steve Morgan in an article for Cybercrime Magazine, “with a new attack [on a consumer or business] every 2 seconds, as ransomware perpetrators progressively refine their malware payloads and related extortion activities.”[1]
As cybercriminals become more sophisticated, their tactics include increased attempts to destroy backup data . According to the Veeam 2023 Ransomware Trends Report, 56 percent of organizations reported running the risk of re‑infection during restoration, only 14 percent were able to recover without paying a ransom, and 19 percent of organizations who paid the ransom still could not recover their data.[2] Having an immutable copy of original data that hackers cannot access means that their effort to destroy or hold for ransom sensitive data is blocked.
The sad fact is that most cybercriminals are never prosecuted, and many are protected by foreign governments. According to Morgan in Cybercrime Magazine, “To date, CNA Financial has made the biggest ransomware payout on record…[paying out] $40 million USD to Russian cybercriminals.”[3]
With the cost of cyberattack estimated to reach $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025, our best defense against cyber criminals, if we can’t lock them up, is to lock them out.
Secure and accessible: The Immutable Solution
The most crucial aspect of data protection and business resilience is the capacity to recover data quickly, accurately, and easily, from a source you know you can trust where all data in transit and at rest is encrypted.
Data immutability ensures your critical business data won’t be destroyed, deleted, or altered—and with ThinkOn, it always remains compliant. Immutable data protects data assets from malicious attacks and ransomware, preventing data loss and allowing for quick recovery.
“A key immutable storage benefit is that the data is virtually impervious to ransomware,” says John Edwards in an article for TechTarget. “Immutable storage effectively prevents ransomware perpetrators from fulfilling their strategy.”[4]
Once data is immutable, it can’t be corrupted making it tamper-and deletion-proof, but still recoverable using the write-once-read-many (WORM) standard.
Manage the data you store and protect
ThinkOn Object Storage with Object Lock provides multi-layered security and access controls to protect and restore data. You gain the advantage of simple and uncomplicated solutions in environments where consistency and dependability are critical.
Since you can read data easily, you can also manage it, gaining insight into your business operations and customer interactions, without risking corruption of the original files. Since it’s a flexible solution with no ingress or egress fees, you can expand capacity and move data between on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments without escalating costs—plus, offloaded backups are self-sufficient, allowing for importation even if the on-premises backup server and all of its settings and database are erased.
Digital protection is about more than locking data away. Organizations need to unlock the power of data while securing its integrity, leveraging the flexibility, cost-savings, analytics, and mobility they need to make their data—and their businesses—thrive.
Learn more about the Immutable Data Advantage with ThinkOn Object Storage.
For more data management and security solutions, read Part One of ThinkOn Object Storage series, “The Big Data Challenge: Turning Capacity Headaches into Business Value”.
[1] Steve Morgan and Charlie Osborne. 2023. Cybercrime Magazine. “Global Ransomware Damage Costs Predicted To Exceed $265 Billion By 2031.” https://cybersecurityventures.com/global-ransomware-damage-costs-predicted-to-reach-250-billion-usd-by-2031/
[2] Veeam. 2023. Ransomware Trends Report. https://go.veeam.com/ransomware-trends-executive-summary-2023-na
[3] Steve Morgan and Charlie Osborne. 2023. Cybercrime Magazine. “Global Ransomware Damage Costs Predicted To Exceed $265 Billion By 2031.” https://cybersecurityventures.com/global-ransomware-damage-costs-predicted-to-reach-250-billion-usd-by-2031/
[4] John Edwards. 2020. TechTarget. “Immutable storage: What it is, why it’s used and how it works.” https://www.techtarget.com/searchstorage/tip/Immutable-storage-What-it-is-why-its-used-and-how-it-works