Maximize your defense against cyberattacks with IBM Storage FlashSystem and IBM Storage Defender.

Cybercrime is good business these days. It exists because the risks are low and the benefits are high. Cybercrime continues to increase without stopping. In 2023, the FBI received a record 880,418 complaints with potential losses exceeding $12.5 billion. This is an increase of approximately 10% in the number of complaints and a 22% increase in the number of losses compared to 2022.

Ransomware has become the most common attack observed globally over the past four years, according to the 2024 IBM® X-Force® Threat Intelligence Index. Organizations aware of the havoc caused by ransomware invest in building defenses against this threat, so it’s no surprise that cybersecurity is the biggest expense in business technology today.

When a cyberattack occurs, ransomware code collects information about the target network and key resources such as databases, important files, snapshots, and backups. Threats that show minimal activity can remain dormant for weeks or months, infecting hourly and daily snapshots and monthly full backups. Once the ransomware has gathered all the information it needs, it launches the actual attack, encrypting your important files and databases and making them unusable. File encryption is fast and an attack can compromise sensitive business data within minutes.

Take your data resiliency to the next level

Fortunately, ransomware attacks can be detected and multiple lines of defense can be proactively put in place to contain and control the threat. To help organizations face the different variants and strategies used to carry out attacks. IBM provides end-to-end data resiliency solutions to effectively protect organizations from ransomware and other malware attacks.

IBM Storage FlashSystem provides storage protection based on immutable copies of data that are logically isolated from the production environment. These safe copies cannot be modified or deleted through user error, malicious acts, or ransomware attacks. IBM Storage FlashSystem also provides inline data corruption detection through the new Flash Core Modules 4 (FCM4). It uses machine learning models to continuously monitor statistics collected from every single I/O to detect anomalies early at the block level.

IBM Storage Defender is a purpose-built, end-to-end solution that seamlessly integrates into your security dashboard to significantly simplify and orchestrate your business recovery process with a unified view of your data protection and cyber resilience health across your hybrid cloud. Deploy AI-based sensors to quickly detect anomalies in virtual machines (VMs), file systems, databases, and other applications hosted on Linux VMs.

We’re better together

These IBM Storage solutions are leading solutions in the cyber resiliency industry. Both have capabilities that complement each other, and working together can significantly improve overall capacity for early threat detection, data protection, and rapid recovery. How they interact in a coordinated way is described below.

To improve threat detection, IBM Storage Defender combines software sensors with inline data corruption detection (IDCD) provided by the IBM FlashSystem Flash Core module. This dual source provides more data to machine learning models, reducing false positives and producing more accurate results.

IBM Storage Defender can also help customers restore production systems more quickly, identifying the most recent trusted copies and their locations. These protected copies can be on primary storage or on existing backups. Once a copy is available on primary storage, clients can restore their work in minutes using values ​​from that system rather than waiting for a restore over the network.

As an additional layer of protection, workloads can be restored in an isolated “clean room” environment, analyzed and validated, and then restored to production systems. This verification gives customers confidence that their data is clean and business operations can safely resume. You can create a Clean Room environment through seamless integration with partner solutions.

business benefits

The harmonious interaction between IBM Storage Defender and IBM Storage FlashSystem improves your line of defense to more effectively combat ransomware, delivering the following benefits:

• A unified, clear view of overall data resiliency across primary and secondary storage.
• Automatically creates a secure, logically isolated copy of your production environment that cannot be modified or deleted during a ransomware attack.
• Detects ransomware at the block level in less than 60 seconds.
• By providing verified protected copies and detailed information about their locations, you can use them as a trusted data source to quickly restore business operations.
• Ability to restore protected copies within 60 seconds.
• A clean room environment to ensure that workloads can be safely restored to production.
• Alerts the Security Operations Center (SOC) and other incident teams to help coordinate recovery plan execution.

Currently, only IBM can provide end-to-end data resiliency across your entire hybrid cloud. By further enhancing the synergy capabilities between IBM Storage Defender and IBM Storage FlashSystem, IBM continues its commitment to deliver industry-leading solutions to maximize business continuity despite ransomware attacks and other data loss risks.

Monitor, protect, detect and recover across primary and secondary storage