ExaGrid Offers a Higher Level of Security
Security was another factor when it came to the Wenatchee Valley College choosing ExaGrid, especially after another local college had fallen victim to a ransomware attack. “The platform itself, from a cybersecurity standpoint, is air-gapped because it’s a Linux-based operating system versus Windows. That provides an extra layer of security from ransomware threats and other types of threats that target backup data, because it’s more isolated from our standard server workload. If we are compromised, our backup data is not going to be compromised as well,” said Garcia.
“A college in our system suffered a massive ransomware attack and all of their servers were impacted, including their backup data, so they couldn’t recover anything. We’ve used their experience as a case study to improve on the areas that they were weak on, the root causes of how it happened, when it happened, and what led up to that ransomware – then made changes to our environment and instituted best practices. Now, even if we are impacted, if our VMware environment and our servers are impacted, we know that the ExaGrid data will not be impacted. I verified that with the ExaGrid engineers, and with Veeam engineers also, to avoid that scenario,” he said.
“It offers peace of mind knowing we have a robust backup system, and that if we are attacked by ransomware, we will get our data back and can resume normal operations. We take precautions to make sure when that does happen – I used to say if that happens, but it’s a matter of when now, from my perspective – when that happens, we can recover and we can get our end users back to their day-to-day operations with all their data,” said Garcia.
ExaGrid appliances have a network-facing disk-cache Landing Zone where the most recent backups are stored in an undeduplicated format for fast backup and restore performance. Data is deduplicated into a non-network-facing tier called the Repository Tier, for longer-term retention. ExaGrid’s unique architecture and features provide comprehensive security including Retention Time-Lock for Ransomware Recovery (RTL), and through the combination of a non-network-facing tier (tiered air gap), a delayed delete policy, and immutable data objects, backup data is protected from being deleted or encrypted. ExaGrid’s offline tier is ready for recovery in the event of an attack.
