With the increasing digital exposure, data security is becoming more critical than ever. Every organization is spending a huge amount of money to protect data against security breaches and unexpected security incidents.

Frequent security breaches have become unavoidable events which not only lead to financial losses but also put your reputation at stake. In fact, a single data breach can expose your organization’s critical data and compromise the personal information of individuals.

Therefore, it’s important to provision effective cybersecurity measures, so you can ensure business continuity during and after the occurrence of an incident. Organizations known for effective security controls and risk management not only gain the confidence of their stakeholders but also attain a competitive edge. Effective data protection helps them meet compliance standards and prevent them from paying ransom to attackers for timely recovery.

Why It’s Important to Be Cyber Resilient

Today, traditional security measures are not enough to ensure adequate data security and achieve zero trust security. It is as important for organizations to respond and recover from data security breaches as it is to prevent them. Cyber resiliency empowers you to quickly overcome security attacks while ensuring business continuity.

Criminal groups resort to use advanced TTPs (Techniques, Tactics and Procedures) to infiltrate networks, encrypt data and demand huge ransom in lieu of providing decryption keys. In some cases, it has been observed that even after receiving the ransom, attackers leave vulnerabilities in the system, making ways for further attacks. They also tend to share these security vulnerabilities with other cybercriminals, making it more challenging for organizations to fight cyber breaches. These attackers have been known to exfiltrate data silently to surge extortion as well.

Attackers penetrate the perimeter defenses and lock down data, leaving organizations with only two ways out:

Option 1: Pay the ransom

Even after fulfilling all the demands, there’s no surety that you will receive the decryption key from attackers to unlock encrypted data within an acceptable timeframe.

Option 2: Attempt to recover

Quick recovery of critical applications or data is important for organizations to ensure business continuity and prevent further losses. For this, IT and security teams need to check whether their backup data is infected by ransomware. If so, then they have no option other than paying the ransom. Even if they have access to their backup data, would it still be possible to find all the data anomalies to accurately assess which applications have got impacted? And would they be able to find the clean copy of data to recover the application? A barrage of such questions are to be addressed. This is why the CIOs and IT decision makers are realizing the importance of integrating data security into their IT operations and data management platforms.

VaultNXT: The Way to Holistic Enterprise Security

It’s time for organizations to change their security approach from just threat prevention to a holistic cybersecurity strategy that ensures end-to-end protection. HCLTech’s VaultNxt helps global organizations in business-critical recovery and business continuity.

The VaultNXT framework is an end-to-end cyber ransomware recovery solution that protects enterprise data against ransomware attack. It offers the last line of defense and safeguards crown-jewel (business-critical) data. The service encompasses our infrastructure, cybersecurity, GRC and OEM tool capabilities, and covers the NIST framework components of cybersecurity (identify, protect, detect, respond and recover).

VaultNXT also helps enterprises evaluate their current maturity against ransomware threats and identify critical data and applications. It provides a resilient environment as per business requirements and helps in preparing a seamless incident response and recovery plan in case of attacks.

The VaultNXT framework involves identifying business-critical data, backing up on immutable storage environment at primary site and pushing this backup data to vault site. The vault can be an isolated air-gapped environment where data is stored in immutable storage. The backed-up data is continuously scanned to investigate ransomware attack.

VaultNXT, Powered by Rubrik

With Rubrik, we’ve build joint service offerings to provide a robust security foundation for data security. VaultNXT, powered by Rubrik, offers a framework for building a cyber-resilient data protection environment with security at the point of data.

HCLTech’s VaultNXT powered by Rubrik Security Cloud is a next-generation platform that protects and secures data across data centers, cloud and SaaS offerings with the following key capabilities:

• Data Resiliency: Secure your data from insider threats or ransomware attacks with air-gapped, immutable and access-controlled backups. VaultNXT provides native immutability and encryption everywhere, so that the attackers can’t see it. It also provides a logical air gap that cybercriminals can’t detect because the backup data is undiscoverable over SMB/NFS protocols. VaultNXT also provides access control at every level with granular RBAC, natively enforced MFA and TOTP and retention lock and intelligent data lock (multi-layered authentication system for making changes in retention policies).

• Data Observability: Continuously monitor data for ransomware attacks, remediate sensitive data exposure and find indicators of any compromise. This offering further helps in determining the scope of ransomware attacks using high-fidelity machine learning to detect deletion, modifications and encryptions. It reduces sensitive data exposure by analyzing the types of sensitive data, storage location and its access control. VaultNxt also prevents malware reinfection by analyzing the time-series history of snapshots for IOCs to identify the initial point, scale and time of infection.

• Data Recovery: Surgically and rapidly recover apps, files and users while avoiding malware reinfection. It ensures safe and quick data recovery by quarantining malware-infected data and restoring business operations. Its pre-built workflows and disaster recovery plans enable prompt recovery of applications.

VaultNxt comes with a robust support system that provides 24x7 incident-based support, globally. The support system is backed by the Ransomware Response Team (RRT) of highly experienced cybersecurity experts. The primary objective of the RRT is to collaborate with and complement your customer’s recovery plans and priorities, including partnering with cybersecurity and/or other technology vendors as needed. RRT delivers the highest levels of urgency, continuity, communications and confidentiality, and remains engaged until your cybersecurity issue is completely resolved.

Conclusion

Cyberattacks are inevitable, and attackers always find ways to breach a system. That’s why it’s time for enterprises to think on how to protect and recover critical data and maintain data integrity.

It’s also essential to evaluate robust cyber resilience strategies to minimize the impact of security attacks and ensure business continuity. Cyber resilience is not only intended to respond and survive a cyberattack but it can also help organizations develop strategies to boost safety and security across critical assets. It helps to improve IT governance, reinforce data protection and prevent malware reinfection.

A Real-life Use Case

The effectiveness of the VaultNXT solution was seen in a recent engagement with a major global pharmaceutical company. As a result, the client attained a complete backup transformation, threat hunt and anomaly detection features. They also achieved significantly improved SLAs and well-defined incidence response strategy to recover data from ransomware attacks.