Achieving Cloud-Based Data Protection Across Your Agency

Today, hackers are attacking public- and private-sector organizations for their data more aggressively than ever. Some bad actors want to own it, some want to delete it and some want to use ransomware to hold the data hostage.

There’s no denying it: Cyberattacks and ransomware are on the rise. And in the federal government, the risk of being unable to recover business processes and data affected by these breaches can be devastating because government data is a critical resource agencies can use to improve operations, drive innovation, deliver better services to citizens and improve civic democracy.

The task of data protection traditionally has been especially daunting, given the increasing complexity of the government IT environment. But a cloud-based data protection solution can reduce that complexity, making it easier to manage the environment and provide oversight of compliance and governance, said Kevin McDonough, Advisory Systems Engineer at Dell EMC.

A cloud-based solution can reduce the complexity of data protection across the enterprise.

Dell EMC Cyber Recovery is designed to protect an organization’s most critical data, McDonough said.

“Cyber Recovery facilitates a robust and proactive workflow to help increase cyber resilience throughout your organization,” he said. “We’ve interacted in this space for a long time, and we’ve put all our brainpower behind developing this product that is out there to protect people’s critical data.”

Dell EMC Cyber Recovery is a complete, isolated recovery solution that can help you minimize downtime, expenses and lost revenue by providing a resilient backup to critical data and a path to recovery from a cyberattack.

To start, Dell EMC offers professional services that help you assess, plan, implement and validate your cyber recovery solution. Dell EMC Cyber Recovery keeps your data in a vault, where it is physically and logically isolated from other systems and locations.

“Cyber Recovery facilitates a robust and proactive workflow to help increase cyber resilience throughout your organization” —Kevin McDonough, Dell EMC

Physically, the Cyber Recovery Vault resides in a restricted room or area in your facility accessible only by individuals with authorized credentials. This limits the ability of in-house saboteurs who wish to hold your data for ransom to complete their objectives.

Logically, Dell EMC Cyber Recovery removes data from the attack surface by using the Representational State Transfer application program interface to provide authentication and authorization services in the Cyber Recovery Vault. Additionally, Dell EMC Cyber Recovery brings flexibility in automating robust analytics by integrating custom or well-known industry tools into your workflow. For example, CyberSense analytics are fully integrated into the product, enabling faster, more assured recovery by identifying the last known good copy of data. Additionally, CyberSense enables forensic capabilities to help quickly identify the source and extent of an attack.

McDonough said that when evaluating a vendor solution for cyber recovery and data protection, agencies should ask several key questions:

• How resilient is the solution?
• How does it protect you against insider attacks and zero-day exploits?
• How does it defend you if someone successfully penetrates your data?
• Beyond disaster recovery, does it support recovery from cyberattacks (i.e., business recovery)?
• Can the solution operate across environments?

Protecting your agency from the inevitability of cyberattacks — especially ransomware — requires a multilayered approach, he said. With Dell EMC Cyber Recovery, you’ll be able to facilitate a robust and proactive workflow to help increase cyber resilience throughout your agency.

This blog post is an excerpt from our recent pocket guide, Protecting Your Cloud Data from Ransomware and More, download the full guide here to learn how federal agencies can find a backup and recovery solution to combat ransomware and other cybersecurity challenges.