I recently had the opportunity to speak Carl D’Halluin from Datadobi about DobiProtect, and thought I’d share some thoughts here. I wrote about DobiProtect in the past, particularly in relation to disaster recovery and air gaps. Things have progressed since then, as they invariably do, and there’s a bit more to the DobiProtect story now.
Ransomware Bad, Data Protection Good
If you’re paying attention to any data protection solution vendors at the moment, you’re no doubt hearing about ransomware attacks. These are considered to be Very Bad Things (™).
What Happens
- Ransomware comes in through zero-day exploit or email attachments
- Local drive content encrypted
- Network shares encrypted – might be fast, might be slow
- Encrypted file accessed and ransom message appears
How It Happens
Ransomware attacks are executed via many means, including social engineering, software exploits, and “malvertising” (my second favourite non-word next to performant). The timing of these attacks is important to note as well, as some ransomware will lay dormant and launch during a specific time period (a public holiday, for example). Sometimes ransomware will slowly and periodically encrypt content , but generally speaking it will begin encrypting files as quickly as possible. It might not encrypt everything either, but you can bet that it will be a pain regardless.
Defense In Depth
Ransomware protection isn’t just about data protection though. There are many layers you need to consider (and protect), including:
- Human – hard to control, not very good at doing what they’re told.
- Physical – securing the locations where data is stored is important.
- End Points – BYOD can be a pain to manage effectively, and keeping stuff up to date seems to be challenging for the most mature organisations.
- Networks – there’s a lot of work that needs to go into making sure workloads are both secure and accessible.
- Application – sometimes they’re just slapped in there and we’re happy they run.
- Data – It’s everything, but super exposed if you don’t get the rest of this right.
DobiProtect Then?
The folks at Datadobi tell me DobiProtect is the ideal solution for protecting the data layer as part of your defence in depth strategy as it is:
- Software defined
- Designed for the scale and complexity of file and / or object datasets
- A solution that compliments existing capabilities such as storage system snapshots
- Easy to deploy and does not impact existing configurations
- A solution that is cost effective and flexible
Where Does It Fit?
DobiProtect plays to the strength of Datadobi – file and object storage. As such, it’s not designed to handle your traditional VM and DB protection, this remains the domain of the usual suspects.
[image courtesy of Datadobi]
Simple Deployment
The software-only nature of the solution, and the flexibility of going between file and object, means that it’s pretty easy to deploy as well.
[image courtesy of Datadobi]
Architecture
From an architecture perspective, it’s pretty straight forward as well, with the Core handling the orchestration and monitoring, and software proxies used for data movement.
[image courtesy of Datadobi]
Thoughts
I’ve been involved in the data protection business in some form or another for over two decades now. As you can imagine, I’ve seen a whole bunch of different ways to solve problems. In my day job I generally promote modern approaches to solving the challenge of protecting data in an efficient and cost-effective fashion. It can be hard to do this well, at scale, across the variety of workloads that you find in the modern enterprise nowadays. It’s not just some home directories, a file server, and one database that you have to protect. Now there’s SaaS workloads, 5000 different database options, containers, endpoints, and all kinds of other crazy stuff. The thing linking that all together is data, and the requirement to protect that data in order for the business to do its business – whether that’s selling widgets or providing services to the general public.
Protecting file and object workloads can be a pain. But why not just use a vendor that can roughly do the job rather than using a very specific solution like DobiProtect? I asked D’Halluin the same question, and his response was along the following lines. The kind of customers Datadobi is working with on a regular basis have petabytes of unstructured data they need to protect, and they absolutely need to be sure that it’s being protected properly. Not just from a quality of recovered data perspective, but also from a defensible compliance position. It’s not just about pointing out to the auditors that the data protection solution “should” be working. There’s a lot of legislation and stuff in place to ensure that it needs to be more than that. So it’s oftentimes worth investing in a solution that can reliably deliver against that compliance requirement.
Ransomware attacks can be the stuff of nightmares, particularly if you aren’t prepared. Any solution that is helping you to protect yourself (and, more importantly, recover) from attacks is a Very Good Thing™. Just be sure to check that the solution you’re looking at does what you think it will do. And then check again, because it’s not a matter of if, but when.