Today, IBM has released Storage Defender version 2.2.2. The headline news in this significant product update is the powerful integration between IBM Data Resiliency Service (DRS) and Predatar’s Recovery Assurance CleanRoom. This collaboration brings totally unique capabilities that will supercharge operational resilience for IBM Storage customers.
This short article explains what the new integration means and why it matters.
Let’s start with why.
For any organization, downtime hurts. Whether it’s caused by a cyberattack, a system failure, human error, or something else – there’s no shortage of real-world stories where businesses have taken months to get back to BAU following an unexpected operational outage. In fact, there’s no shortage of stories where businesses simply didn’t survive the fallout in the weeks and months that followed one.
When an outage occurs – and the services that your organization runs on stop working – the first hours are crucial. But all too often IT teams find themselves facing into these incidents having never actually recovered these complex applications and digital services before.
Sure – they’ll have a recovery plan to follow. But the chances are, it’s never actually been tested. There’s a lot that can go wrong – and it often does.
Corrupted, encrypted or infected data will derail your recovery – while complex interdependencies can mean if servers aren’t restored in the correct sequence – applications will repeatedly fail to come back. Would you want to be figuring all of this out in the middle of a high-pressure, high-stakes situation?
What organizations really need is proof. They need proof that their most important services can be recovered quickly, cleanly, and completely. Importantly, they need to have that proof before they find themselves in a crisis.
This is the challenge that IBM and Predatar are solving together. This is what the Storage Defender 2.2.2 release is all about.
Proof. Not Promises.
Proving your business is resilient isn’t just a good idea; it’s quickly becoming a necessity for many regulated organizations – particularly in the financial services sector and those that operate critical infrastructure.
Regulatory bodies are increasingly demanding evidence of the efficacy of the resilience plans and controls that have been put in place.
Previously, documents like recovery plans, recovery guarantees, and SLAs (Service Level Agreements) which specified Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives were considered enough to demonstrate that an organization was taking resilience seriously.
Now regulators have recognized that these documents are meaningless unless the claims they make have been put to the test.
Insurance providers are catching on too – and big changes are coming in the cyber insurance market. Organizations that can’t demonstrate their resilience may find themselves exposed – hit with bigger premiums, or even discovering that they are unable to claim against some types of cyber incident.
Read about the implications for the cyber insurance in the article:
Cyber Insurance is Changing. Recovery Promises Won’t Be Enough.
Proof. Done properly.
Lots of technology vendors are racing to solve these important challenges. But buyers beware – not all proof is equal. There’s three important things to know when assessing potential solutions:
Restore is not recovery.
Testing individual servers or file systems proves very little. Your important business services are built from multiple servers, databases and storage volumes often spread across fragmented platforms – and they only come back if every component is restored in the right order.
Real proof means actually completing end-to-end recovery of services, within a measured recovery time – even if its components reside across platform technologies.
Clean is not always recoverable.
Malware scanning tells you a backup or snapshot is safe. It doesn’t tell you if it is incomplete, corrupted, or incapable of booting.
The only way to be sure is to actually recover it and power it up.
Yesterday’s pass is not today’s proof.
Patches, upgrades and day-to-day operations mean that your IT environment is changing every day. An annual or quarterly DR test that was completed yesterday is already out of date.
Proof has to be continuous.
These are the challenges that IBM’s Data Resiliency Service and Predatar are uniquely placed to solve.
Introducing the Proof Engine.
No one technology vendor has solved this complex problem end-to-end. That’s why IBM and Predatar joined forces.
While the project to integrate Predatar with DRS started almost a year ago, and some of the foundational development work shipped earlier this year in the Storage Defender 2.1.2 release – today’s release is what really makes the vision a reality for DRS customers.
By integrating Predatar’s unique Recovery Assurance CleanRoom technology with DRS, IBM has created a Proof Engine – an AI-powered capability at the heart of your Operational Resilience that will quietly and continuously recover your most important digital services into an isolated validation environment – 24/7.
DRS users will now see the Predatar CleanRoom as a first-class source type in the DRS interface. They can schedule automated recovery testing and malware scanning of the backups that make up the recovery groups that DRS has defined.
Every recovery runs in Predatar’s isolated CleanRoom. The results get logged as evidence against the business applications they support. It works across Storage Protect and Defender Data Protect, with support for some non-IBM backup platforms too.
DRS already detected threats, mapped dependencies and provided a powerful governance platform. What Predatar brings is proof of recovery. With Storage Defender 2.2.2, DRS can show that recovery works, continuously, with no engineering effort once the schedule is set.
Start your journey to proven resilience
To learn more about proving recovery in your business with IBM Data Resiliency Service – Powered by Predatar, speak to your IBM storage rep, your Authorized IBM Business Partner, or contact Predatar.
