Securing and Safeguarding Data with HYCU 4.1

This is the third article in our four-part series about Securing Your Backup Data and Safeguarding Against Ransomware. 

To date, we have discussed points around how HYCU offers customers the flexibility and freedom to choose storage targets that can make sense for their backup environments (particularly the kind that offer anti-ransomware capabilities).

To recap, HYCU customers now have the flexibility to:

• Select Nutanix, NFS, SMB, or Bucket/Object Storage targets that offer a means to make data immutable
• Inform admins when a bad actor or unauthorized user is attempting to change or write files without permission
• Tightly control access to a storage appliance’s interfaces
• Use HYCU’s native snapshot capabilities to safeguard against ransomware

As always, our primary goal is to make sure your data is safe, secure and easy to manage.

With the arrival of HYCU 4.1, there are several new capabilities and enhancements we have introduced to secure backup data and safeguard against ransomware even further. For example, customers who want to send backup data to Nutanix Buckets or S3 Object Storage (i.e. for copy or archival purposes) will be able to consider leveraging WORM (Write-once read-many) to make their backup data immutable. Additionally, we now offer end-to-end encryption for customers who want to leverage cloud targets. This means that data can be encrypted before it is in-flight (transported over an HTTPS/TLS connection) and when it lands on the cloud storage (which may also be providing native DARE/Data-at-rest-encryption). This next generation HYCU software/virtual backup appliance running on CentOS 8 will include pre-configured hardening measures for the new Linux platform. That means that Backup Admins will have even less work to do to harden the next-gen virtual backup appliance to comply with any newly established security standards.

Beyond the matter of security, HYCU 4.1 now also offers a number of new enhancements that will help to speed up recovery times, aid in the process of effectively backing up Nutanix Files (with respect to open or locked files), provide additional source VM exclusion capabilities, offer built-in pre-/post- script capability for additional database application support, streamline policy assignment for discovered VMs through the use of labels/tags, keep track of VMs that have been failed-over or migrated from one location to another, expand archival options, cleanup old backups, and offer additional network-related options during restores/clones. And, HYCU 4.1 customers may now enable legal hold, along with preventing selected manual backups from deletion, as needed.

Apart from our focus on security and continuous enhancement efforts and partnering with the right storage and cloud vendors, HYCU has also created a way to backup VM and application data to the cloud and re-instantiating it in the cloud. That can all be managed by way of HYCU R-Cloud, our multi-cloud data protection, migration and disaster recovery solution. You can learn more about HYCU R-Cloud.

Also, now that HYCU is available for two major public clouds, customers have the option to backup their VMs/Instances with HYCU SaaS solutions that are integrated into IAM, are managed/scalable, and can be included in their respective monthly cloud bills. Similar to on-prem HYCU solutions, those solutions also provide purpose-built, agentless, backups/snapshots that fit closely with your Cloud Projects and Resource Groups.  They also leverage cost-effective cloud object storage options and present recovery options that give customers flexibility within or across Regions and Availability Zones.

In the next and final post in this series, we will cover network related topics for HYCU and explain the remaining pertinent items we believe to be relevant to your needs, from a security, performance, and reliability standpoint. 

Here are some additional resources to help you get started:

• HYCU for Enterprise Cloud – What is new in v4.1
• HYCU for Enterprise Cloud – Backup‍
• HYCU for Enterprise Cloud - Files‍
• ‍HYCU for Enterprise Cloud - Recovery
  

Thank you for reading and following HYCU.  As always, we welcome your feedback and comments!