Iron Mountain data recovery adds ransomware protection
The isolated nature of Iron Mountain's latest Iron Cloud offering is important to its battle against ransomware. The Virtual Cleanroom provides an offline recovery environment.
Iron Mountain data recovery wants to perform "CPR" on organizations that get hit with ransomware.
The Iron Cloud Critical Protection and Recovery (CPR), set to launch this month, isolates data, disconnecting it from a network. It provides a "cleanroom" to recover data, in the event of an attack, and ensures that ransomware is out of the system.
"Every business is really data-driven today," said Pete Gerr, senior product manager at Iron Mountain, which is based in Boston. "Data is their most valuable asset."
Legacy backup and disaster recovery "really weren't built for the modern threat environment," and isolated recovery offers the best protection against ransomware, Gerr said.
Ransomware continues to get smarter and remains a prevalent method of cyberattack. Phil Goodwin, research director of storage systems and software at IDC, said the majority of risks for organizations' data loss involve malware and ransomware. "It's not a matter of if they're going to get hit, it's a matter of when," Goodwin said.
That's caused many organizations to proactively tackle the problem with ransomware-specific products.
"It's moved from a backroom discussion to the boardroom," Gerr said.
Iron Mountain data recovery gets 'clean'
Iron Cloud CPR features Iron Mountain's Virtual Cleanroom, a dedicated computing environment hosted within Iron Cloud data centers that provides an air gap. The cleanroom serves as an offline environment where customers can recover backups stored within the secure CPR vault. Then customers can use data forensic utilities or a designated security provider to audit and validate that restored data sets are free from viruses and remediate them if necessary, Gerr said.
It's moved from a backroom discussion to the boardroom.
Pete Gerrsenior product manager, Iron Mountain
Customers then use Iron Mountain data recovery to restore selected sets back to their production environment or another site.
"The last thing we want to do is recover a backup set ... that reinfects your environment," Gerr said.
The air gap, which ensures that ransomware does not touch a given data set, can also be found in such media as tape storage that is disconnected from the network.
Goodwin cautioned that the CPR product should complement an organization's backup and recovery platform, not replace it.
"It will fit well with what the customer has," he said.
Iron Cloud CPR also includes a managed service for organizations using Dell EMC's Cyber Recovery for ransomware recovery. Hosted in Iron Mountain's data centers, Iron Cloud CPR for Dell EMC Cyber Recovery on Data Domain enables customers to isolate critical data off site for protection against attacks, using a cloud-based monthly subscription model.
CPR is part of the Iron Cloud data management portfolio, which was built using Virtustream's xStream Cloud Management Platform. The portfolio also includes backup, archive and disaster recovery services.
Both Iron Cloud CPR offerings are fully managed services and work without any other products, Gerr said. They will be available as part of Dell EMC and Virtustream's data protection portfolios.
Iron Mountain, which claims more than 230,000 customers across its entire product line, said Iron Cloud CPR is expected to be generally available by the end of June. Several customers are working with the Iron Mountain data recovery product as early adopters.
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