One time Backup & Archive On-Demand Ransomware Protection

Many businesses are in the data services business without even realizing it.  For example, law firms are provided with extremely sensitive and proprietary data pertaining to their clients, and assume a custodial role of those records, which imparts upon them a duty to protect and preserve them. If you are a law firm with thousands of clients, the associated risk can amplify rather quickly.  A typical way to mitigate this risk is a one time backup or archive.

While these businesses often have data security and disaster recovery plans in place to protect and preserve their own data, along with their clients’,  hackers are always one step ahead of these solutions.  Security solutions are often reactive, meaning they are created to address problems which have already occurred to someone else.  As may now be evident, there is no guaranteed way to ensure that you are protected, and evaluating and adding a continuous stream of expensive products designed to allow you to keep your data online is an expensive and daunting task. 

So what’s the solution?  It is the time-tested backup tape!  A one time backup to tape creates an air-gapped method to create point-in-time snapshots of data that hackers cannot access once created, if they are removed from the backup system.  (Check out this great article in NetworkWorld about how tape popularity is increasing, specifically as a defense against ransomware.)

S2|DATA is not in the game of creating backup applications, but we are experts at using and restoring from them. We are also experts at vaulting services and providing data insight into large pools of previously backed up data with our proprietary technologies TRACS & Invenire. Our service here is particularly aimed at service providers of their client data. This includes eDiscovery practitioners, Digital Forensic practitioners, and Law firms. Anyone that has provided a service to process/search/preserve data that may be litigation sensitive. Our service can be employed once only to catch up on all the disparate data you have, or perhaps on a more routine basis such as once per month. The process is simple:

• We consult with you to determine approximately how much data you have and how/where it is stored
• We prepare the necessary equipment to come on-site and back it up to tape
• We create a duplicate copy, one for your retention and one for our vault
• Once the tapes return to our vault, we perform a forensic scan which captures all the file metadata present on the tape(s) backed up. 
• The metadata is ingested into Invenire on AWS, our metadata review platform and we provide you with login credentials. This enables you to locate particular files in seconds should you have a requirement to know what you have
• The tapes are securely stored off-line, file content is not accessible to any would-be hacker
• At this point you can either continue operation as normal knowing that your historical client data is accessible to that date point should you be hacked with ransomware, or you could now purge the systems and redeploy them, reclaiming all that storage space and processing power

Contact an S2|DATA backup and restore expert to discuss if a one time backup might be perfect for your unique situation.