Ransomware Recovery from 16 Days to 16 Minutes with HYCU Protégé

In 2017, we delivered the first purpose-built and cutting-edge backup and recovery solution for Nutanix.

To this day, that still continues to be a next-gen platform for enterprise cloud customers and partners like. We fundamentally believed there was a different way to handle data protection for on-premises and public cloud environments then, and that belief carries forward to today. Our evolution has been rapid, as today, we support several new platforms across both public cloud, enterprise cloud and scale-out NAS. At the same time, we recognized the growing threat that ransomware and cyber-attacks were creating within the broader industry and our own customers. We built our solutions to deliver unparalleled support for ransomware recovery through our unique air-gapped and immutable backup strategy. We also understood the importance of being best prepared in the event of an inevitable ransomware attack. Along with a number of key industry partnerships (FireEye Mandiant, Carahsoft, Boston College Cybersecurity Studies, and SADA), we delivered the industry’s first ransomware recovery preparedness and recovery assessment capability with R-Score™ (getrscore.org.)  While the average downtime from ransomware can lead to days, we have helped many of our customers with their ransomware recovery in minutes. As one customer experienced, he recovered from an anticipated 16 day outage due to a ransomware attack to just 16 minutes, thanks to HYCU.

As always, we wouldn’t be here without the support and commitment from all of our existing customers. With the continued adoption of our multi-cloud solutions, HYCU has been sold in more than 75 countries to more than 3,100 customers across a highly diverse set of industry verticals. Our unending quest of customer success has enabled us to deliver enterprise-class customer service, setting a high bar for customer success. Our 91+ NPS (Net Promoter Score) is the highest of any backup vendor in the market.

Today, we announced a number of new and significant updates to HYCU Protégé designed to help organizations be better protected against ransomware and to help with ransomware recovery in the event of an inevitable attack.

These updates include the following:

‍Data protection for Dell EMC Power Scale

Customers with Dell Power Scale that includes Dell Power Scale Archive NAS Platforms (previously known as Isilon) is well known for hosting massive amounts of data within NAS shares. Given the scale required, backup of Power Scale clusters is a strenuous and challenging task. This is notable because a NAS share backup is much more complex than a typical VM backup for a variety of reasons:  

• Sized from hundreds of terabytes to tens of petabytes
• Dense directory structure hosting millions of files and folders
• Performance impact created during backups of these NAS shares
• Granular restore of a single file can be like searching a needle in a haystack

A legacy backup solution with an outdated integration (such as NDMP) to Dell EMC’s Power Scale will be brought to its knees just trying to back up a couple of these NAS shares. This results in long backup windows, frequent backup failures, SLA breaches and ultimately a compromised backup strategy for Dell EMC PowerScale customers.

With HYCU’s purpose-built native integration to Dell EMC’s Power Scale, the solution can offer reliable data consistent backups of both NFS and SMB shares regardless of their scale and size. By using the Power Scale’s Snapshot change-list, HYCU can provide highly efficient incremental backups with lower RPOs that can meet the most stringent backup SLAs.  

With its inbuilt microservices styled architecture, HYCU can easily measure up to Power Scale’s extremely large size and scale. This means, HYCU can easily backup shares that can range from terabytes to petabytes with millions of files and folders. HYCU also keeps track of all files and folders that’ve been backed up with a dedicated index. This makes recovery of a single file or folder a far easier.  

HYCU can also perform backups of Power Scale NAS shares to on-prem or cloud-based object storage with no performance penalty. This is a huge advantage from a TCO perspective as there’s no need for expensive storage arrays to store these extremely large-sized backups.

Incremental forever archives with flexible schedules

Organizations with compliance obligations (such as healthcare and financial to name a couple) can be required to store backups for a very long time. Customers try to store these backups on cheap and deep storage, but with time and the sheer scale of data, what was once cheap can become very expensive.  

So, typically companies try to create archives instead of retaining hourly or daily backups. They simply retain few daily, monthly, and yearly full backups as archives because it is easier to recover compared to its original incarnation, where archives were sent to tapes with slow and error-prone recovery.  

The problem here is even with low backup frequency (weekly/monthly/yearly), full backups can still consume large amounts of capacity over a period of time.

HYCU now supports incremental forever archives of VMs, Nutanix Volume Groups and Physical servers. This means HYCU’s archive backups just needs one full backup followed by a subsequent infinite number of incremental backups (which are gracefully expired by HYCU’s retention policy). This provides customers with an exponentially more cost-effective way to save capacity and associated costs on backup storage.  

While some backup vendors offer incremental-forever archives, the challenge is the recovery process. Recovery can be very cumbersome and time consuming for backups with lengthy incremental chain. However, with HYCU’s unique block-based tracking, customers now have efficient, granular and full restores with zero performance penalty on its incremental forever backups.  

While most customers stick with standard weekly, monthly and yearly policies for archives, many customers have networking constraints, business impact considerations and compliance requirements that mandate backups at a very specific schedule. HYCU provides a highly customizable scheduler that can offer a wide range of options from daily to quarterly schedules. This is in addition to HYCU’s existing Weekly, Monthly and Yearly policies.

Expanding WORM support for immutable backups

With the prevalence of ransomware attacks becoming the new normal, businesses are extremely concerned that it’s only a matter of time before their organization will get impacted by an inevitable ransomware attack. The only way for organizations to have an assured uncorrupted copy of their production data is to have the backups protected via WORM storage, making backups immutable.

The requirement for WORM storage for backups also comes from Cyber Insurance companies. If customers can validate that they have immutable backups for assured ransomware recovery, then their cyber insurance costs go down. Additionally, customers also have compliance needs which mandate that their backups are immutable by utilizing WORM storage.

In addition to supporting WORM-enabled AWS S3 and Nutanix Objects, HYCU can now support direct backups, copies and archives to WORM-enabled Azure Blob and Google Cloud Storage (GCS). This ensures the capabilities of backup immutability are more accessible to Azure and Google customers.

‍Integrating with centralized security & manageability apps

Enterprise Customers typically hosting a huge number of production workloads have a hard time managing credentials for their individual VMs and Apps, typically these can span in the thousands of instances. It can be a constant challenge to prevent unauthorized access and keep track of every action leading to sleepless nights for security architects and CISOs. These customers are in constant need to manage the access keys and login credentials in a highly secure and centralized fashion.

This leads to security teams, especially at large enterprise organizations, refusing to allow administrative access to backup admins.  

To alleviate this challenge, customers typically use centralized access management systems like CyberArk Conjur Credential Stores. HYCU is one of the few cutting-edge solutions that can deliver specialized integrations with these security applications. With HYCU, backup admins can achieve centralized and secure access to their backup infrastructure via CyberArk Conjur Credential Store with no need to specify any login credentials.

While these are several of the most important highlights of our current Ransomware Recovery Release, you can check out a complete listing of our latest capabilities here. In addition, For information on HYCU Protégé for Enterprise Clouds and Public Clouds, and our ransomware protection and recovery capabilities, reach out to us at info@hycu.com or follow @hycuinc and connect with us on LinkedIn.