Role of NetApp ONTAP and Data Infrastructure Insights

Now more than ever, sophisticated ransomware attacks pose a significant danger to businesses. The threat only continues to escalate in this ever-evolving digital landscape, which is why NetApp IT has implemented automated and advanced solutions, leveraging capabilities within ONTAP and Data Infrastructure Insights (formerly Cloud Insights) to help protect against ransomware attacks and the inevitable calamity that follows.

These solutions offer multiple layers of defense and coverage for our storage environment, safeguarding every critical point from perimeter security to storage. This ensures protection against threats like compromised storage administrator accounts and malicious users, while also incorporating technologies that mitigate damage in the event of an attack.

Nearly 75 percent of organizations have experienced an attempt or successful ransomware attack in the last 12 months. Yet only half of that percentage has admitted to having a well-defined and thoroughly tested ransomware attack response strategy. With the advancement of artificial intelligence and related technologies, criminals can quickly launch attacks now better than ever. Extending far beyond the purview of any IT department, this issue has quickly become a board-level problem for all large enterprises.

NetApp’s storage engineering team has identified crucial enterprise needs to improve recovery strategies and help prevent attacks. NetApp IT has delivered thorough solutions that meet these necessities - offering ransomware solutions like Snapshot, SnapVault, and SnapLock, in addition to other protective measures featured in ONTAP.

NetApp Snapshot offers remediation and restoration services, defeating ransomware head-on with Snapshot copies. This solution provides protection by preventing data deletion, allowing only those with administrative access to delete vital Snapshot copies.

NetApp IT uses Snapshots on most data volumes across every landscape. Each volume has a read-only Snapshot copy that is retrievable in the event of a data breach, helping to rapidly recover data from attacks and restore the base volume to a specific point in time.

While Snapshot offers remediation and restoration, SnapVault provides data protection and disaster recovery. These are immutable and long-term backups, available on-site and off-site, to a separate cluster. While Snapshot focuses on primary storage, SnapVault allows businesses to have backups on a remote cluster.

NetApp IT uses SnapVault to safeguard production volumes, providing yet another level of protection from harmful threats. Based on Snapshot copies, SnapVault offers storage efficiency that is preserved over the wire and is leveraged with SnapMirror to sub-prod secondary data centers for offsite data recovery.

To ensure secure protection against ransomware, SnapLock compliance prevents the deletion of vital Snapshots. For optimal ransomware protection, both SnapLock and NetApp’s SnapVault help lock backups and provide immutable and indelible Snapshot copies for NAS and SAN volumes.

SnapLock compliance ensures that Snapshots cannot be tampered with or deleted, offering additional security options to add a recovery cluster at the primary or secondary data center. These volumes are virtually “air-gapped,” which provides optimal detection and prevention services for data. This level of protection is why NetApp IT uses SnapVault with SnapLock compliance for several Tier One applications, specifically any data protected under Sarbanes-Oxley regulations for maximum security.

In addition to NetApp’s primary ransomware solutions, other protection capabilities are available within ONTAP. These include Tamperproof Snapshots, Multi-Admin Verification, and Autonomous Ransomware Protection (ARP). Each of these technologies provides a layer of security that monitors and protects the system from potential threats.

Tamperproof Snapshots

• Near SnapLock Compliance-level protection for Snapshot copies.
• Building on the level of protection offered with Snapshot, they assign volumes an expiration time to prevent deletion or modification for a specified active retention period.
• NetApp IT utilizes Tamperproof Snapshots for all volumes, excluding volumes managed by Trident and some LUNs, to leverage on-prem and in the cloud.

Multi-Admin Verification (MAV)

• Prevents compromised, malicious, or inexperienced admins from making undesired configuration changes or deleting data.
• Ensures certain operations, such as vol or Snapshot deletion, can only be executed after approval from one or more designated administrators.
• NetApp IT leverages MAV on all ONTAP clusters, which are enabled to approve changes to ARP policies and other config modifications.
• MAV challenges bad actors from infiltrating data storage and helps protect your information from unprecedented attacks.

Autonomous Ransomware Protection (ARP)

• Provides autonomous detection of potential attacks by identifying and responding to threats in the primary storage location.
• ARP does not require additional software or hardware requirements; its built-in and silently learns the volume activity (i.e. file level activity, extensions in use, and entropy)
• When ARP goes active, it reports in real-time if anything deviates from the benchmark statistics.
• If anomalous behavior is observed, Autonomous Ransomware Protection automatically takes early Snapshots and alerts administrators about the imposing danger to minimize attack impacts.

NetApp has elevated its security measures by incorporating anomaly and threat detection services to safeguard data with actionable intelligence. NetApp IT utilizes this technology for all on-prem NAS volumes, enhancing data protection and offering robust recommendations to prevent future attacks. Data Infrastructure Insights and Cloud Workload Security deliver valuable insights and visibility into your NAS workloads. This system alerts administrators to potential misuse or theft of key intellectual property based on usage patterns, making it highly beneficial for Enterprises looking to manage and secure access to sensitive data.

In today's advanced technological environment, where threats are more prevalent than ever, it is crucial to implement effective measures to safeguard your information and data. The NetApp solutions discussed offer comprehensive defense across nearly every storage service layer and are continually improving.

As an IT organization, we actively provide feedback to our product teams as we strive for improved solutions. You can stay updated on the latest ransomware technology advancements by visiting our website and joining future NetApp on NetApp sessions to gain insights into NetApp IT’s product solutions.