IT priorities are constantly evolving, influenced by trends such as GenAI, cybersecurity, and cloud computing. Amidst these changes, the critical importance of data as a strategic asset remains steadfast. GenAI, in particular, enhances data's value, making its security, availability, and history even more crucial. As data risks diversify and intensify, relying solely on backups is no longer sufficient. Organizations need a comprehensive, modern approach to data security to thrive.
Understanding Data Security
Data security involves protecting digital information from unauthorized access, theft, or corruption throughout its lifecycle. Unlike traditional data protection focused on preventing data loss due to system issues, modern data security addresses a broader range of threats and outcomes.
Data Security in the Age of GenAI
A decade ago, the primary data security concern for enterprises was availability risks caused by infrastructure and application downtime. The focus was on ensuring system reliability and tolerance to outages. However, as cloud technology advanced, infrastructure redundancy has significantly reduced these availability risks. This shift has redirected attention to the data layer, which now requires additional dedicated focus to address new security challenges.
The rise in ransomware attacks and malware threats has made cyber risks a major concern for data security. These threats target both production data and backup copies, which are often the last line of defense for compromised businesses. Additionally, the growing sophistication of attack vectors and the increased significance of data due to AI advancements have heightened user risks, such as data exfiltration and exposure by malicious insiders. Compliance regulations have also imposed new demands for accurate and secure data handling throughout its lifecycle, introducing process risks. These evolving threats and requirements necessitate comprehensive data protection strategies that go beyond traditional availability risks to address loss, leakage, and data integrity issues.
The Imperative of Modern Data Security Solutions
Data insights enhance threat detection, cyber response, and recovery reliability. Modern data security solutions should promote collaboration across IT, cybersecurity, legal, privacy, and compliance teams, offering continuous data security insights that strengthen the overall security posture. These solutions cater to various personas within an organization, ensuring data availability, security, privacy, and compliance.
Key Tenets of Effective Data Security
An effective data security solution should address the following key questions:
Is the data securely protected? Ensure recoverability from secure backups, maintain immutability, and control retention policies.
What is the security posture or sensitivity of the data? Assess data sensitivity, storage locations, and compliance criteria to activate appropriate remediation.
What is happening to the data? Implement Data Detection and Response mechanisms to monitor data activity and enrich security operations.
What is the impact of a critical data event? Rapidly assess and address the impact of security incidents with comprehensive data security insights.
The Modern Data Security Approach
Legacy data security solutions, such as those from Veeam and other competitors, are often on-premises, complex, and fall short in today's environment. Druva disrupts this model with a fully managed, cloud-first SaaS approach, offering three unique advantages:
Power of the Platform: Protects all customer workloads on a single platform, enabling consolidated metadata for enhanced threat detection and AI-powered capabilities.
Power of Simplicity: Removes infrastructure management complexities, offering a seamless unified SaaS experience without the burden of hardware, manual processes, or patching.
Power of Intelligence: The “network effect,” Druva continuously learns from its growing customer base, applying insights to enhance security for all customers.
The Druva Data Security Cloud: Data Security on Autopilot for the Modern Enterprise
The Druva Data Security Cloud leads the industry as a pioneering 100% SaaS and fully managed platform, engineered to secure and recover data from various threats. Druva employs a zero-trust security model and ensures the highest level of security across all workloads. The platform provides a comprehensive solution encompassing autonomous protection, rapid response, and guaranteed recovery.
Druva Data Security Cloud is architected on top of secure AWS infrastructure, and enables air-gapped protection, data immutability, and robust encryption, ensuring foundational security and rapid data recoverability. Smarter and quicker response capabilities allow organizations to assess and address incidents promptly, complementing existing perimeter defenses, to provide accelerated recovery and robust protection against modern threats. Druva’s seamless integration with leading OPSEC tools enables organizations to safeguard data across all environments, simultaneously reducing overall risk and operational costs.
Druva features air-gapped storage and a control plane for managing data protection across environments, including on-premises servers, virtual infrastructure, cloud workloads, SaaS applications, and endpoints. As a cloud-native solution, organizations avoid the overhead of managing on-premises hardware, achieve scalability on-demand, and get the cost advantages provided by global deduplication built on object storage. As a result of these benefits, customers typically see cost savings of up to 40% vs. competing solutions like Veeam.
Empower Your Team From Response Through Recovery
Druva’s capabilities extend the foundational security architecture, enabling organizations to proactively monitor security posture, detect potential threats early, threat hunt, and swiftly respond to and recover from ransomware attacks. Druva provides unique insights that can be obtained only from the data itself, empowering and informing organizations’ actions across the NIST framework.
It addresses the key questions of an ideal data security solution as follows:
Is the Data Securely Protected?
Druva delivers secure cloud data protection across various workloads, including SaaS apps, public cloud, hybrid cloud, and endpoints. Druva’s unique differentiation is fully air-gapped and immutable data protection — from the infrastructure to the backup data. Advanced capabilities such as eDiscovery, legal hold, and cloud retention help with more effective data controls. With a host of certifications such as FedRAMP, StateRAMP, FIPS, CCPA, HIPAA, and more, Druva offers the most secure approach to protecting all enterprise data.
What is the Security Posture or Sensitivity of the Data?
Druva’s data security posture management (DSPM) enables organizations to proactively comply with regulations, stay ahead of violations, and optimize legal hold management while minimizing the complexity of data governance. Using pre-built compliance templates for key regulations, the platform detects and provides visibility into compliance risks across the full environment, spanning endpoints, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and more. Additionally, authorized users can defensibly delete non-compliant data in backups, the source, or both.
What is Happening to the Data?
Druva delivers 24x7x365 advanced monitoring and threat detection capabilities across the entire backup environment, enabling early detection of malicious activities. Druva’s Managed Data Detection and Response (DDR) is an AI-powered and human-enhanced service that enables rapid response and guaranteed recovery without impacting production. Druva keeps track of the full history of audit logs and provides change logs between points in time to accelerate investigation. This information is always available — even when a customer’s production environment might be impacted due to a cyber attack.
What is the Impact of a Critical Data Event?
When a data event has been confirmed, Druva plays several critical roles across response, recovery, forensics, and notification.
The Druva Data Security Cloud manages secure, clean copies of all the data, from which the impacted backups can be reliably recovered with Druva’s Accelerated Ransomware Recovery capabilities. Curated Recovery finds the most recent clean version of each file, reducing the extent of potential data loss — while Sandbox Recovery allows for the data to be securely recovered in a quarantined location and certified as clean before being recovered into production.
Also built into the Data Security Cloud are Threat Hunting capabilities. With threat hunting, the impact of the data threat can be quickly assessed and isolated via quarantine and defensible deletion. Here again, Druva’s platform approach of having a single metadata namespace across all protected workloads accelerates and simplifies threat hunting and federated search. Data can be automatically scanned during recovery to reduce the risk of reinfection.
Finally, Sensitive Data Governance capabilities help in forensics and notifications by assessing the extent of the impact of this critical data event. With these features, customers can determine if any sensitive data has been compromised, the users that have been impacted, the compliance regulations that might have been violated, and more.
Conclusion
In a data-driven world, robust data security is essential for organizational success. Druva’s innovative, data-powered platform ensures data availability, confidentiality, and fidelity, empowering businesses to confidently address critical risks.
Read the white paper for an in-depth look at Druva’s approach to data security.