Beyond AWS Native Backup: The Growing Importance of Cyber Resilience

As cyber threats become increasingly sophisticated and frequent, organizations can no longer rely solely on traditional backup solutions. The rise of ransomware attacks, insider threats, and other malicious activities has made it clear that a robust cyber resilience strategy is not just a luxury-it's a necessity.

Cloud architectures built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) can enjoy the convenience of native cyber security tools. And that may be fine for some.

But enterprises that require enhanced security can trust Rubrik to provide third-party security tools to protect their data. And there are several key differences that many Rubrik customers value above native data protection tools:

• Ease of use

• Lower TCO

• Built-in cyber resilience

• Backup and recovery speed

This fourth article in a series about the benefits of third-party protection examines the growing importance of cyber resilience. It is critically important in today's threat environment, where sophisticated cyberattacks like ransomware and data breaches can disrupt operations and compromise sensitive information within minutes. By ensuring systems can withstand, adapt to, and recover from such threats, organizations safeguard their financial stability, customer trust, and regulatory compliance against ever-evolving cyber risks.

What is Cyber Resilience?

True cyber resilience goes beyond mere data backup and recovery. It requires advanced threat detection capabilities, the ability to isolate and quarantine potentially compromised data, forensic tools to analyze backup data, and intelligent recovery options. These features transform backups from passive data copies into active defense mechanisms, serving as the last line of defense capable of not just restoring data, but restoring it in a way that ensures the ongoing security and integrity of your environment.

In today's complex threat climate, simply recovering to last night's backup is no longer sufficient. Cyber attackers have evolved their tactics, often lying dormant within systems for extended periods before striking, targeting both backup and production data to maximize their chances of a payout. This means that traditional backups may unknowingly capture and preserve malware alongside legitimate data, creating a significant risk within your recovery options. Without the ability to perform deep scans for anomalies, conduct thorough threat hunts, and quarantine potential threats within backups, organizations are left guessing at safe restore points, often leading to repeated compromises and extended downtime.

True cyber resilience goes beyond mere data backup and recovery. It requires advanced threat detection capabilities, the ability to isolate and quarantine potentially compromised data, forensic tools to analyze backup data, and intelligent recovery options. These features transform backups from passive data copies into active defense mechanisms, serving as the last line of defense capable of not just restoring data, but restoring it in a way that ensures the ongoing security and integrity of your environment.

As we move forward in increasingly hostile digital conditions, organizations must recognize that traditional backup solutions are no longer enough. A comprehensive cyber resilience platform, incorporating advanced threat detection, isolation, and intelligent recovery capabilities, is critical for ensuring business continuity and data integrity in the face of ever-evolving cyber threats.

Rubrik's Superior Approach to Cyber Resilience

Rubrik Cloud Native Protection goes beyond simple backup and recovery, offering a comprehensive suite of features designed to protect your data against even the most advanced cyber threats. Let's explore how Rubrik provides true cyber resilience:

Immutability: Rubrik stores your cloud-native backups to immutable storage. That means that once data has been processed by Rubrik, it can't be modified, altered, or changed by any external entities. This immutability is crucial in preventing ransomware from encrypting or corrupting backup data. While AWS Backup offers some level of protection, it doesn't match the depth of Rubrik's immutability guarantees.

Air-Gapped Backups: Air-gapping cloud backups is essential. If a cloud account is compromised, attackers will often look to find and destroy any backups within the same account. Rubrik protects against these scenarios by allowing organizations to bunker their data to different regions-or better yet, entirely different cloud accounts. Furthermore, Rubrik Cloud Vault, a fully managed cloud storage solution, can also host cloud backups, providing organizations with storage that sits completely outside of their identity landscape.

Retention Lock and Quorum Authorization: While immutability protects against unauthorized access to the data, organizations must also worry about authorized access. For instance, what if a rogue administrator or an attacker with stolen credentials decides to simply log in and change the retention settings of a Rubrik SLA? In this scenario, backups could be marked for expiration, ensuring the success of a cyberattack.

To protect against this, Retention Lock can be configured on a Rubrik SLA-this means that any change to an SLA that would result in a shorter retention period would be essentially blocked. In order to officially make this change, Quorum Authorization requires that at least two designated users within the organization provide approval before the retention change can be made, ensuring backups are available when you need them.

True Least Privileged Access: Organizations today are relying more and more on clean rooms and minimum viable recovery environments to assist with both root cause analysis and recovery efforts. In order for these ecosystems to function securely, strict isolation and access requirements must be adhered to. This involves ensuring that users and applications don't need long-standing write access into these settings.

Rubrik's robust Role Based Access controls allows organizations to surgically grant permissions to identities, ensuring they only contain the exact permissions they need to perform their role. This not only adheres to good security practices, but decreases an organization's overall risk.

Data Threat Analytics: Rubrik's Data Threat Analytics provides Anomaly Detection and Threat Monitoring capabilities against protected resources within Rubrik Security Cloud. Anomaly Detection leverages the rich Rubrik-generated metadata after each backup, and sendsit a two-stage machine learning process that discovers anomalies between backups and scans for signs of encryption. In the end, customers are alerted to any modifications, additions, or deletions within their backups that are deemed suspicious, along with predictions around any ransomware strains discovered, and their subsequent ransomware notes. This allows customers to quickly determine the blast radius of an attack, and identify the exact workloads, down to the folder/file level that the attack compromised.

Rubik's Threat Monitoring feature allows organizations to scan for indicators of compromise within their backups. Using these scanning capabilities, organizations can quickly identify what point in time backups still contain signs of malware, pointing out your last known clean restore point, giving administrators peace of mind that they won't simply reinfect their environment upon restoration.

Data Discovery and Classification: The next logical step in remediating a cyber attack is to gain an understanding of the types of data that have been compromised. Rubrik's Data Discovery and Classificationprocesses allow organizations to easily discover and classify sensitive data within their environments, be it located on-premises, in the cloud, or delivered through SaaS models. This allows organizations to easily identify risk within their environments, and analyze data proliferation over time across their different workload and environment types, ensuring that the highest level of security is applied to their workloads containing highly sensitive information.

Data Risk Management: Rubrik's Data Risk Managementbuilds on top of Data Classification features, allowing organizations to eliminate or archive unused or stagnant data, while ensuring that the remaining data has been protected appropriately. Organizations can leverage Data Risk Management features to identify overexposed data within the cloud-data that is public or internet-facing-and align data protection with published security standards and regulations. This can reduce cloud storage costs and lower overall data risk.

Data Access Governance: Rubrik's Data Access Governanceprovides much the same risk analysis as Data Risk Management, but focuses on users and identities within your organization. The goal is to minimize excessive and unqualified access to sensitive data. This means classifying users with access to sensitive data as high-risk identities and right-sizing their permissions to limit the attack surface should the account become compromised. In the event an attack occurs, Data Access Governance can accelerate your incident response and forensics by tracing activity that leads to the breach.

Data Detection and Response: Data Detection and Responseprovides organizations with the ability to detect suspicious and malicious data activity within their cloud environments. This includes continuous monitoring to help ensure that all sensitive objects are audited for potentially malicious activity, and reducing the overall noise of alerts by prioritizing activity and monitoring notifications based on how sensitive the data or objects affected are. Finally, full integration into leading SIEM and SOAR tools allow organizations to reduce their Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) by leveraging the data context from Rubrik to automatically kick off playbooks to investigate threats further.

Take Your Cloud Data Protection to the Next Level

While AWS Backup is a capable solution providing basic backup and recovery features, Rubrik Cloud Native Protection stands head and shoulders above in terms of cyber resilience. In today's threat environment, the robust protection offered by Rubrik isn't just an advantage-it's a necessity.

By choosing Rubrik, you're not just selecting a backup solution; you're investing in a comprehensive data security and cyber resilience platform. In an era where data is one of your most valuable assets, can you afford anything less?

Ready to take your cloud data protection to the next level? Contact us today for a demo of Rubrik Cloud Native Protection and see firsthand how we can enhance your organization's cyber resilience.