Information Technology Navigator

The risk of a ransomware attack continues to increase at a frightening triple-digit annual growth rate. How bad is it? Bad, really bad. Businesses based in the U.S. face a 60% chance of an attack, compared to 31% chance in EMEA and 9% in the Asia-Pack region. As the attackers’ sophistication increases and cybergangs are forming, it is important to understand what the attackers are going after and how to increase your ransomware resilience.

Ransomware Demand and Payment Trends

4 Key Hybrid Cloud Operational Challenges

On February 9, 2020, Infinidat rolled out some major enhancements to its InfiniGuard enterprise data protection platform. The announcement themes revolved around enhanced data protection, faster recovery and overall cyber resilience.

Here are some key takeaways and features worth noting:

Ransomware has rapidly become the single largest cyber threat we face today and if the first half of 2021 was any indication, things are only going to get worse. Colonial Pipeline, Kia Motors, JBS Foods, Kaseya and CNA Financial have been some of the more notable, high-profile attacks this year. In the case of the Colonial Pipeline, the attack impacted over a dozen U.S. states and cost the company $5 million. Colonial Pipeline was able to recover ~$2.3M of the ransom, but that is often not the case. CNA Financial was not as fortunate and needed to pay an estimated $40 million to retrieve the encryption keys for their data. And ransom from the Kaseya attack, which impacted an estimated 800 to 1,500 businesses, is said to be in the range of $70M which would make it the largest ransom ever paid (should Kaseya decide to pay).

Every IT professional already knows that the proliferation of log files generated by Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions can be overwhelming to manage. There are multiple SIEM tools that analyze and automate this tremendous amount of data to provide alerts that help troubleshoot network issues, quickly remediate threats, and identify potential non-compliance vulnerabilities.

“Do more with less” has become the mantra folks in IT have come to live by. It is the reality we live with every day. We must be as efficient and effective as possible to be able to compete in today’s market. We must find a way to be viewed as an innovation center, and not a cost center to the business.

How we go about enabling the enterprise to innovate is what sets us apart. It all starts with a good plan and to have a good plan, you must understand the strengths and more importantly, the weaknesses in your IT environment.

As the cost of solid-state technology decreases and its capacity increases, flash technology has steadily been making inroads into the enterprise storage architecture, to the point where flash has become a standard component of most storage solutions. Just how much flash is necessary, however, is the question confronted by directors of infrastructure who are trying to balance cost with their companies’ needs for high performance.

IT managers have long envied the power of all-flash storage for accelerating their most demanding workloads. Unfortunately, the much higher cost-per-terabyte for all-flash storage compared to traditional spinning disk storage has—in many cases—kept these ideas in the realm of wishful thinking. A data reduction technique called deduplication, however, is bringing all-flash storage into the realm of economic reality.

For years, traditional spinning disk technology reigned as the only option for enterprise storage. While the speed and performance of other infrastructure components improved exponentially, hard drive technology has improved only incrementally with performance remaining largely the same since the year 2000 when the first 15K RPM drives were released. Traditional hard drive storage has been, and remains, a common bottleneck, making otherwise powerful IT systems sluggish and inadequate for handling the demands of modern workloads.

All-flash storage arrays are all the rage among IT teams looking to coax as much performance as possible out of their storage infrastructure. Thanks to the generational maturity of the technology combined with data reduction techniques like inline deduplication and compression, all-flash storage is no longer the economic impossibility it once was.