New Year, New BCDR Resolutions

In the past two years, IT has undergone a massive change. A staggering 96% of all organizations are accelerating cloud usage to adapt to changing business models in a global economy. As legacy systems are stretched across modern platforms, organizations must adopt new approaches to business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) to ensure complete protection. Transformational technologies put in place to support distributed enterprises over the pandemic were put to the test, and they’re here to stay.

Looking towards the year ahead, it’s time to reveal the top three News Year’s resolutions of Unitrends Unified BCDR — a comprehensive data protection platform — to see what’s in store for 2022.

Resolution #1: Unified BCDR resolves to have the completeness to protect all workloads regardless of where they live

According to findings in Unitrends 2021 State of BCDR Survey, approximately 30% of workloads are being delivered via the cloud. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) accounted for 53% of these workloads while another 47% were delivered via SaaS applications. Overall, the percentage of organizations that plan to move to a fully cloud-hosted model is anticipated to increase by 70% over the next two years.

As environments are increasingly distributed and growing in complexity, you need a BCDR solution that’s able to unify different approaches to workload protection under a single pane of glass, in part simplifying complex systems and reducing the space between jumping through different UIs and consoles to manage different workloads.

Unified BCDR resolves to:

• Holistically support protection for data protection approaches. Whether your workloads exist on-premises, on remote endpoints or in clouds and SaaS applications, you can protect them by utilizing different backup approaches offered by the platform. Unitrends UniView enables you to manage all of them holistically from a single user interface.
• Enable customized global alerts to cut through the noise across your platform and prioritize resolving issues that directly impact recoverability as it relates to your SLAs (RTO and RPO). Powered from the cloud, the global alerting system is able to alert admins to incidents even when a local appliance may not be able to do so.
• Reverse proxy into modularized components (such as individual appliances) through SSO from the global interface, reducing login attempts across the platform and speeding up time to resolution.

Resolution #2: Unified BCDR will leverage automation and artificial intelligence to address risks and threats with agility

The attack surface for threat actors to target organizations with cyberattacks is incredibly broad. In a landscape rife with cyberthreats, using a solution that leverages automation and artificial intelligence helps reduce the frequency and impact of occurrences of data loss and downtime.

The combination of automation and AI serves to simplify complex tasks, provide deep levels of visibility into activity within your environment, and help guard employees against human error and cybercrime.

Unified BCDR resolves to:

• Provide you with 100% confidence in recoverability by automating recovery testing. Testing is a challenge since many organizations don’t have the resources to regularly test recoverability. Unitrends Recovery Assurance helps users orchestrate tiered, application-level recovery testing against multiple systems to certify recoverability of workloads with all dependencies, data and services validated in an isolated sandbox.
• Protect end users from advanced phishing threats. By injecting purposeful security integrations into our SaaS backup solution, organizations are provided front-end protection against cybercrime with in-depth anti-phishing defense, including warning banners and click-to-quarantine suspicious emails, while proactive dark web monitoring alerts to credential compromise and exposure enabling IT to secure accounts at risk before an attack occurs.
• Reduce the time you spend troubleshooting backups. Unitrends Helix brings automation technology to serve the infrastructure use-case. Helix, powered from the cloud, is constantly on the lookout for remediation opportunities to autonomously solve issues related to your environment (such as VSS errors) and backup appliances before they can negatively impact backups.

Resolution #3: Unified BCDR will provide a secure, hardened platform to keep backups safe from ransomware

A ransomware attack is launched every 11 seconds and attackers are craftier than ever before, implementing nefarious techniques such as dormancy and un-decodable encryption. Often, by the time a victim realizes something is wrong, it’s too late. With most attacks targeting Windows systems, the operating system of your backup solution can make you more vulnerable.

Combating ransomware requires a multi-pronged approach, from end-user training and awareness, proactive network monitoring, antivirus, firewalls, anti-phishing defenses and a purposeful hardening of your backup infrastructure.

Unified BCDR resolves to:

• Provide a secure backup appliance written on a hardened Linux kernel. The Linux OS lies outside of the Windows attack surface and camouflages backup files from malware hunting for Windows-based extensions. Additional controls, such as role-based access control, help secure the backup environment from unwarranted access.
• Enable secure, off-site data retention and disaster recovery using immutable cloud storage. Immutable cloud infrastructure means that once written to the target, no source can modify, delete or otherwise change data. Your local appliance can read the data and import it back from the Unitrends cloud for recovery at any time with no additional fees.
• Detect sleeper ransomware and slow-burning infections with machine learning. Equipped on every appliance, machine learning establishes baseline patterns of behavior by measuring a number of heuristics within backup data. When symptoms present themselves that match the behavior of clients infected by ransomware, alerts are immediately sent to administrators and displayed on the appliance dashboard, while the appliance flags suspected backups to prevent them from being used in a recovery attempt.

Hello, 2022!

We’re incredibly excited about what Unified BCDR has in store for everyone in 2022. We will continue to make enhancements and drive innovation across the platform. Ultimately, the goal is to provide the most complete, agile and secure solution in the marketplace that’s priced right for any organization’s needs.

To see how your current solution stacks up against Unified BCDR, take our BCDR Tech Challenge today!