Veeam Immutable Storage

Veeam immutable cloud storage is a feature available through Veeam Cloud Connect Backup Service providers and something you should considered in your data protection strategy. The goal for this blog post is to outline some of the features and benefits of immutable storage and how it can help protect against ransomware attacks or data deletion. 

Just a reminder, there is a difference between data protection and disaster recovery. In considering data protection, it should be all about protecting your corporate data, categorizing it by importance and thinking through Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and risk mitigation best practises.

For example, it may be important to your business that keep separate monthly and annual full backup jobs running for additional protection for compliance or audit purposes. If that is the case, you might consider Immutable Storage. 

Disaster recovery is more focused on Recovery Time Objective (RTO); how quickly you need to get your applications and data up and running. While there is some overlap, it should really be a separate data analysis that might complement your data protection strategy.

The analysis might be slightly difference, with examples including business losses arising from idle employees for every minute a key system is down. For a data protection provider like Whipcord Edge, we leverage replication to our ready to go DRaaS cloud for customers with mission critical workloads.

What does Immutable Storage offer?

Immutable Storage enforces a write-once-read-many (WORM) mechanism and ensures that once data is written to the storage repository, it cannot be altered or deleted. 

How does it help?

Ransomware mitigation:

An additional layer of defense against ransomware attacks that target backup files. It helps safeguard your backups by preventing malicious encryption or modification by ransomware. 

Data Integrity:

Immutable Storage helps maintain the integrity of your backups. Since the data stored in the immutable repository cannot be modified or tampered with, you can be confident that your backups remain free from unauthorized changes or accidental deletions.

‘Golden’ copy of your data:

In the event of a ransomware attack or accidental data deletion, you can quickly restore your data from a known good backup, ensuring minimal downtime and reducing the impact on your business operations.

Compliance and Data Sovereignty:

Many industries have regulatory, audit and jurisdictional requirements around data retention and where your data resides at rest. Whipcord Edge and Veeam Immutable Storage can help organizations meet these compliance standards with confidence ensuring their data resides in Canada with a Canadian company. 

Point-in-Time Recovery:

Immutable Storage allows you to maintain multiple restore points over time. In cases where your production data is compromised before you stored it, you can revert to an earlier, uncorrupted restore point.

Flexibility and Compatibility:

Veeam Immutable Storage is one among many cloud storage options available through a Veeam Cloud Connect service provider. Once you categorize your data, immutable, standard, archive and even geo-redundant copies become options to protect your data. Remember the best practise of keeping multiple copies of your most critical data!

Overall, Veeam Immutable Storage offers enhanced protection against ransomware, data deletion and compliance requirements, ensuring the availability and integrity of your data. By considering immutable storage with your data protection strategy, you can significantly improve your organization's resilience to cyber threats and operational mishaps.