Combat ransomware with comprehensive data security from Varonis and Qumulo

Have you noticed that those suspiciously urgent text messages or emails supposedly coming from one of your company’s executives are becoming more frequent? It turns out, you’re not alone. Cyber threats against organizations, like phishing and ransomware, have been on a dramatic rise over the past year. In fact, ransomware attacks increased 13% in 2022 alone¹ — equal to the prior five years combined. Attacks are not only increasing in volume, but in complexity and magnitude with 72% of organizations reporting an increase in at least one of these areas last year.²

When you consider the rapidly growing “gold mines” of data these targets are sitting on, it’s easy to see why attackers are getting bolder and more sophisticated. Cyber attacks have become so ubiquitous that it’s no longer a matter of “if” but “when” your organization becomes a victim. The bigger and more sensitive your data, the more likely your company has a target on its back.

Fortunately, two can play this game. With Qumulo, your holistic data security posture now includes two new major enhancements to safeguard against and recover from internal and external threats:

• As part of our Simply Secure initiative, Qumulo now integrates seamlessly with data security leader Varonis to help you track where your sensitive data may be overexposed, and to ensure rapid detection and prevention of threats.
• Snapshots on Qumulo, can now be locked, preventing them from being deleted accidentally or maliciously and enabling faster recovery and near-zero RPO.

Real-time visibility of your data, everywhere

Ever since the global pandemic pushed so many of us to work remotely, enterprises have gotten a lot more distributed. With more users creating, managing, and accessing data from more devices in more locations, it’s become more difficult than ever to keep track of what your data is doing and who has access to it. What’s more, when a highly distributed organization is compromised, recovery can be more costly. On average, the cost of a breach can be nearly $1 million greater³ when remote work is a factor compared to situations where remote work is not involved.

Luckily, we have an answer. Through our new integration with the Varonis Data Security Platform, you can now count on an additional layer of protection and visibility everywhere your data lives. We partnered with Varonis to provide an end-to-end solution that protects your data from ransomware both on-prem and in the cloud. The Varonis Data Security Platform provides real-time visibility over your data in any environment and automatically remediates risk with behavior-based threat models that can proactively detect abnormal activity and stop threats before they become breaches.

Our combined solution addresses three areas to protect against bad actors’ attempts to spread ransomware and malware within Qumulo:

• Prevention through continuous data exposure and risk monitoring with automatic remediation and least privilege enforcement
• Detection of nefarious activity and suspicious patterns that resemble ransomware across data stored in Qumulo
• Rapid recovery of data in the event of a successful attack

Support near-zero RPO with lockable, immutable snapshots

While prevention plays a critical role in data security, the sheer volume of attacks that occur on a regular basis makes it virtually impossible to prevent intrusions with 100% certainty. Despite preventative efforts, 94% of organizations reported unplanned downtime in the past year which can cost an average of $250,000 per hour.⁴ Therefore, having efficient recovery mechanisms for rapid remediation is critical.

Snapshots offer a space-efficient failsafe to recover your critical data in the event of data loss or corruption. However, what happens if a rogue administrator (or a bad actor who gains administrative access) tries to tamper with your snapshots?

While snapshots on Qumulo are already immutable, our latest release adds another critical backstop for recovery. You now have the ability to lock a snapshot, preventing it from being manually deleted from the system until it reaches its predetermined expiration date. Qumulo’s snapshot-locking feature uses cryptographic protection, where only the customer has access to the cryptographic key-pair required to unlock the snapshot. This adds another safeguard against both human error and cyber threats, ensuring that your data can still be recoverable, even in the event of a breach. This is particularly important for ransomware, considering that only four percent of ransomware victims get all of their data back² — even after paying the ransom!

Download our Data Security Best Practices white paper to learn more about how Qumulo helps keep your data Simply Secure.