There’s a vault for that

When you think of protecting physical assets at a bank, you probably think of a vault. In the same way, digital assets can be protected with a cyber vault. NetApp’s new cyber vaulting solution can protect your most valuable data while also keeping it available, intact, and confidential. 

Safeguarding your organization’s critical data has become a business imperative as cyberthreats are increasing at alarming rates. Traditional data protection methods have not been able to keep up – until now. 

Cyber vaulting is a specific data protection technique that involves storing critical data in an isolated environment, separate from the primary IT infrastructure. It starts with an “air gapped" system, which is a network or device that is physically separated from other systems, isolating it from the outside world. This device is then protected from cyber-attacks, such as malware, ransomware, and keyloggers. 

However, the device requires an immutable and indelible data repository that is protected against threats affecting the main network, including insider threats. Cyber vaulting can be achieved with NetApp^® ONTAP^® Snapshot™ copies protected by NetApp SnapLock^® Compliance. While under SnapLock Compliance protection, data cannot be modified or deleted, not even by ONTAP administrators or NetApp Support.

NetApp’s innovative cyber vault combines advanced logical air-gapping techniques with industry-leading data protection measures to create an impenetrable barrier against cyberthreats. NetApp cyber vaulting employs the highest standards of security and offers a range of benefits, including enhanced breach protection, rapid recovery capabilities with immutable and indelible copies, and seamless scalability to accommodate your growing data volumes.

The primary reason that cyber vaulting is needed is the growth and sophistication of cyber-attacks, particularly ransomware and data breaches. With a rise in phishing and more sophisticated methods of credential stealing, information used to begin a ransomware attack could then be used to access infrastructure systems. In these cases, even hardened infrastructure systems are at risk of attack. The only defense to a compromised system is to have your data protected and isolated in a cyber vault.  

Whether you’re protecting intellectual property, customer data, or mission-critical systems, cyber vaulting gives you the peace of mind that comes with knowing that your information is secure.  

NetApp cyber vaulting, powered by SnapLock, provides organizations with a comprehensive and flexible solution for protecting their most critical data assets. By leveraging logical air-gapping with robust hardening methodologies for ONTAP, NetApp enables you to create secure, isolated storage environments that are resilient against evolving cyber threats. With NetApp, you can ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your data while maintaining the agility and efficiency of your storage infrastructure.   

Traditional cyber vault architectures use air-gapped backups that involve creating space and physically separating the primary and secondary media. By moving the media offsite and/or severing connectivity, bad actors have no access to the data. This approach isolates data from the network and protects the data; however, with SnapLock Compliance, physical separation is not required. SnapLock Compliance protects your vaulted Snapshot point-in-time, read-only copies, resulting in data that is quickly accessible, safe from deletion, immutable and more importantly indelible. 

SnapLock Compliance may be used to comply with the Banking and Financial regulations SEC 70-a-4(f), FINRA 4511(c), and CFTC 1.31(c)-(d). It has been certified by Cohasset Associates to adhere to certain technical aspects of these regulations (audit report available upon request). By using SnapLock Compliance with this certification you get a hardened mechanism for air gapping of your data that is relied upon by the largest financial institutions in the world to ensure both retention and retrieval of banking records.

With today’s cyberthreats – and tomorrow’s unknown security challenges – an attack on your primary storage could be easily extended to secondary storage. The best way to protect your data and minimize any ransomware attack is to have a NetApp cyber vault. It’s a purpose-built architecture for a logically air-gapped cyber vault, using NetApp ONTAP.  

It will enable you to have immutable, indelible snapshots of your data locked in a cyber vault, with strict access controls using a hardened configuration. To simplify the use, the cyber vault enjoys the same API and orchestration suite support as all NetApp ONTAP systems. You can also use the lowest cost storage possible, with capacity flash and hybrid flash options.  

Consider a NetApp cyber vault and check out our cyber resilience solutions to learn how you can protect your most secure assets.