We are pleased to announce the release of Catalogic DPX 4.8.1, where we have taken a major step forward to enable our DPX customers to be amongst the best prepared to recovery from a cyberattack. This release builds on our foundational ransomware recovery and cyber resilience features to add a ground breaking new capability called DPX GuardMode, that provides proactive monitoring for early detection and notification of suspicious activity along with identifying and enabling the recovery of any affected data.

We also added many customer-driven enhancements including to DPX vStor, and we continued our theme of adding more foundational product resilience to enhance reliability and ability to respond rapidly to any vulnerabilities discovered at a later stage in the lifecycle.

We also announced DPX vPlus for Microsoft 365, a powerful data protection solution for Microsoft 365 and each of its components – Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Teams – and DPX vPlus for Open VMs supports platforms such as Citrix Hypervisors, KVM, Nutanix Acropolis or AHV, Oracle VM, Proxmox, RHEV/oVirt, Scale Computing HyperCore/HC3, and XenServer, along with Amazon EC2. DPX vPlus delivers greater workload coverage for an organization’s edge and cloud data.

Let’s review the major new features of our DPX 4.8.1 product.  We’ll cover DPX vPlus in a future blog.

DPX GuardMode

With the new DPX GuardMode agent, we added the ability to change your security posture to be more proactive against ransomware posture by providing the ability to detect and get notified of suspicious behavior in your file systems and what files are potentially affected. Initially, this is for Windows only, and we’ll be adding Linux soon. To learn more, please watch this on-demand webinar, Adding Cyber Resilience to your Data Protection Strategy with Early Detection, with industry analyst Evaluator Group and Sathya Sankaran, COO of Catalogic Software.

Foundational Cyber Resilience

We migrated the DPX appliances to a different Linux distribution called AlmaLinux OS, an open-source, community-driven distribution that fills the gap left by CentOS when it discontinued stable releases. We updated the version of the distribution to the 8.5 release, which is 1:1 binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

All the JREs and Java stacks DPX uses have updated to OpenJDK 17.

These changes provide us with the ability to respond more rapidly to any future vulnerabilities discovered at a later stage in the lifecycle.

DPX vStor Management Updates

vStor Updater

This new feature adds the ability to update the appliance from within the vStor UI to new versions without having to interact with the underlying operating system CLI.

Relationship Grouping

One of the areas in which our customers are often commenting is the need to configure synchronization to a secondary vStor on a per-volume basis and not having a clear overview of the health of these individual synchronization sessions.

With this release of vStor, we have added a replication applet on the vStor Dashboard, which provides a graphical of the session status. We have also added the ability to group volumes in replication groups, where each volume will inherit the groups’ replication settings and schedule.

Virtualization Proxy

We released a pre-configured VMware Proxy virtual appliance to ease the deployment of a proxy server in the correct locations for optimized data transfer of the backup data. This is for VMware environments where DPX agentless for VMware is in use.

Deploying DPX and vStor Virtual Appliances in Hyper-V

The DPX and vStor appliances can now be deployed from a mounted ISO on the Hyper-V host and are completely installer driven.

Legal Hold for Amazon S3 Object Lock

You can now add a legal hold on your data on Amazon S3 to protect this data from being overwritten, even after the associated backup job has expired.

Report Enhancements

All reports visible in the HTML5 GUI of DPX have been enhanced and now report on the full dataset of DPX.

Summary

The DPX 4.8.1 release also contains other enhancements and bug fixes of course. For further information on DPX 4.8 and earlier releases, see the What’s New in DPX 4.8 and What’s New in DPX 4.8.1 document and other resources on the DPX products page. Customers with support can access more detailed information on release notes on the Support page.  For more information on Microsoft 365 backup and Open VM backups, please see DPX vPlus.

Whether it is ransomware attacks, human error or IT outages, every business needs an affordable and reliable data protection solution like Catalogic DPX to backup and instantly recover data to ensure business continuity. Have a question or want a live demo? Contact us today!

Catalogic DPX and Micro Focus OES Backup

Catalogic Software is not one of those data protection vendors that have abandoned Micro Focus Open Enterprise Server (OES) backups. Catalogic DPX has provided industry-leading Novell backup and recovery for OES and Groupwise products since 1997, and we even pioneered many data protection features such as OES cluster-support and deep integration for GroupWise backup. And unlike many other OES backup vendors, we are still committed to the Micro Focus OES, including full support for Micro Focus OES 2018 SP3 and OES 2023 release.

Unitrends and Micro Focus OES Backup

For decades, Novell and more recently Micro Focus OES customers have relied on Unitrends for OES backup and granular recovery. Using its OES agent, Unitrends allowed users to protect all aspects of their OES environment, including files, directories, and web-application management tools like eDirectory, iFolder and iManager. It also offered the ability to granularly restore individual files and folders, which is extremely important for OES customers since applications like eDirectory are responsible for identity-based management, networked storage, and file directories for employees, clients, and/or students. Though recovery of an entire OES server due to corruption or a disaster is necessary at times, the majority of recovery jobs are lost or accidently deleted files from these directories.

Disappointed and Surprised Unitrends Customers

Unitrends customers have recently been discovering some upsetting news – oftentimes receiving this surprise after they notice their backup jobs have been failing and have opened a support ticket. Post its acquisition by Kaseya, Unitrends has published a list of unsupported operating system agents, including the agent that supports OES backup. Unitrends is treating OES servers like any other virtual or physical machine. It provides server-level backups and restores but without an agent, it has lost the file and object-level granularity that is needed for OES data protection.

What this means for legacy Unitrends customers is that when an administrator receives a request from an employee who accidently deleted an important file, they can no longer recover the individual file. Instead, they need to restore the entire virtual machine and then figure out how to migrate or copy the specific OES object like eDirectory to its original location. This is difficult enough for those customer using OES in a virtual environment and it is near impossibility for those who run their OES on physical machines.

This change in direction by Unitrends is forcing hundreds of customers to either seek alternative backup solutions, or to move away from Micro Focus OES and other operation systems altogether. In fact per their unsupported agent notice: “Unitrends strongly recommends pursuing alternate methods of protecting data residing on these Operating Systems.”

DPX is That Alternative Micro Focus OES Backup Solution

If you are one of those Micro Focus OES or GroupWise customers searching to find that replacement for Unitrends, look no further than Catalogic DPX. DPX has provided industry leading backup and recovery for Novell products since 1997. We have even pioneered many data protection features such as OES cluster-support and deep GroupWise integration. And unlike Unitrends and many other vendors, we have never backed away from our commitment to the Novell family of products, even after the acquisition by Micro Focus.

Catalogic DPX support for OES includes cluster configuration, GroupWise environments, and backup of standalone and shared volumes, eDirectory, etc. It provides the ability to perform full, incremental, and differential backups, and these backups, unlike with Unitrends, can be at the volume, directory, and even individual file level. Then, more importantly, files can be restored with security, metadata, and file-attributes/trustee rights still intact. For more information on OES cluster and GroupWise support, please see Catalogic DPX is the Smart Choice for Micro Focus OES Customers.

DPX even has its own software-defined storage repository called DPX vStor that can act as a flexible and scalable disk directory for your OES backups. Built on open source components, vStor can use any block storage without restrictions, freeing you from expensive Unitrends backup appliances and vendor lock-in. vStor supports data reduction in the form of both deduplication and compression for efficiency and provides point-to-point replication for DR or remote office support.

Protecting your Micro Focus OES Backups from Ransomware

Data Protection is often the last line of defense when it comes to ransomware attacks. DPX delivers a secure data protection solution with instant recoverability to help ensure you can protect your backup data set from ransomware and recover data in an instant when you need it.

With DPX, you have integrated ransomware protection:

• Support for the 3-2-1-1 rule provides a robust data protection solution with verified scheduled recoveries for automated recovery testing.
• 3 copies of your data
• 2 copies stored on different storage media types
• 1 of the copies offsite or in the cloud on immutable media
• 1 copy verified as recoverable
• Encryption of backup data in transit over the network and at rest via DPX vStor volume encryption

To learn more, please see Recommendations From FBI Cyber Division on How to Reduce Risk from Ransomware Attacks and watch this free webinar: Protect and Recover Micro Focus OES from Ransomware Attacks.

Now is the Time to Change Your OES Backup Vendor

Just because Unitrends and others are no longer providing the backup and recovery capabilities that you need, it does not mean OES customers are out of options. Catalogic DPX is a proven, cost-effective and reliable alternative, and Catalogic is committed to providing effective, granular Micro Focus OES backup and recovery for all aspects of their environment.

Regarding ransomware protection, if your OES backup solution is not hardened against recent vulnerabilities with all the required patches and updates (remember log4j?), or if it does not provide you with immutable backups with granular recovery, now is the time to make a change.

If you would like to learn more about Catalogic DPX, you can request a live demo or even get a 30-day trial copy to try it for yourself. We’ll be happy to provide a review of your data protection environment and help you set up a proof of concept.

At the heart of every data protection solution is the backup repository where the backup data that the protection solution is protecting resides. The ever beating heart of Catalogic DPX is vStor, a virtual storage appliance. The vStor backup repository is a software-defined, flexible and scalable backup target that frees you from expensive backup appliances and vendor lock-in, unlike many of the current market players.

DPX vStor Backup Repository Architecture

Built on open source components, vStor can use any block storage without restrictions. It supports data reduction in the form of both deduplication and compression for efficiency and provides point-to-point replication for DR or remote office support.

Figure 1. DPX vStor Architecture

vStor can be configured to meet your needs – your choice of physical or virtual servers, any form of block storage and all the leading cloud storage providers, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. DPX vStor Provides Choice of Server and Storage

With DPX vStor, you can build different backup targets to meet your performance needs. For example, a single vStor virtual appliance to support a ROBO or small environment, or a high-performance vStor built on all-flash storage for your most critical workloads. For backups to and recoveries from a vStor server, both block backups and agentless backups are fully supported.

Once your backup data is safe and sound in the vStor, you then have a choice of options for enabling DR and archive. You can replicate the content to a secondary vStor, and offload to tape or to cloud storage providers such as Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Blob storage, Backblaze B2, Cloudian, Scality, and MinIO.

Ransomware Protection with vStor and S3 Object Lock

We are all aware ransomware is a growing industry with it being nearly impossible to go a day without seeing an attack impact a business and hit the news headlines. So what can you do?
Please review and follow these recommendations on how to reduce risk from ransomware attacks for ensuring you have integrated ransomware protection and recovery via Catalogic DPX.

With DPX vStor, backups are stored as immutable snapshots and can be offloaded as offline, air-gapped copies of backups. For copies going to cloud object storage, you can enable S3 Object Lock meaning you can store your backup data sets using a write-once-read-many (WORM) model.

S3 Object Lock can prevent your backup data from being deleted or overwritten for a fixed amount of time or indefinitely. You can use S3 Object Lock to help meet regulatory requirements that require WORM storage, or to simply add another layer of protection against unauthorized changes and deletion.

Support for S3 Object Lock is provided for leading cloud storage providers including Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, and more. It’s a really simple process to configure:

• Run agentless or agent based backups to vStor
• vStor offloads to S3 object storage
• S3 Object lock configured within DPX prevents ransomware from tampering with your backup data

Immutable copies can then be restored from the cloud storage in the event of a cyber-attack.

Figure 3. DPX vStor Supports S3 Object Lock

DPX vStor Deployment and Management

Deploying DPX vStor is very slick and simple. Once your DPX data protection solution has been correctly architected and sized you can deploy your vStor in a few minutes and start backing up your data into the vStor.

Day to day management has been designed to be as easy as possible via the vStor user interface which shows the following via the interactive dashboard:

• vStor health status
• Capacity allocated and free
• Compression ratio
• Deduplication ratio
• Backed up data history for the last day, week or month
• Backup storage trend for the last day, week or month
• Replication session details per source volume
• Type of shared volumes
• Disks in use

Figure 4. DPX vStor Day to Day Management

Your Next Data Protection Step

Want to learn more about DPX data protection and the vStor backup repository? Please contact us by form or email and we can quickly provide a product demonstration, our guaranteed low pricing, and a free proof of concept.

In 2014, Micro Focus acquired Novell, in a move that extended the mainframe software provider’s reach into Linux. This acquisition included Novell’s Open Enterprise Server (OES). Micro Focus OES is a server operating system that provides a virtual computing environment and shared network resources, giving it the functionality of an enterprise-scale server operating system. OES consists of multiple modules and components around files, storage, directory, and web application management which are essential for shared files, print networks, driver deployment, identity-based management, and network connectivity for Windows, Mac, and Linux client devices.

Protecting Micro Focus OES Data in an Education Environment

All these things make OES a very useful tool for school districts, universities, and colleges around the world. Having the ability to provide shared network resources to faculty and staff, as well as to students, provides benefits for school administrators. Due to the reliance on these shared resources, protecting the shared files is extremely important.

For a specific school district and an art university, having the need to recover lost or deleted files became an everyday occurrence. For years, they had relied on Unitrends to provide them with granular backup and recovery of their OES data. However, for both organizations, the administrators arrived to work one day and realized that their scheduled backup jobs had failed. As they usually would in these instances, they opened a support ticket with Unitrends. But this time, they were told that OES-specific backups are no longer supported.

Replacing Unitrends with Catalogic DPX for Micro Focus OES

Given Unitrends no longer supports their OES backup agent, these customers would have to instead utilize Unitrends virtual machine snapshots to protect their OES data. With this workaround, they would lose the ability to perform single-file recovery of an OES resource, something they previously did on a regular basis.

Luckily for them, Catalogic DPX provides a replacement for Unitrends that is fully committed to supporting Micro Focus OES. DPX has provided industry leading protection and recovery for Novell products since 1997, and we are committed to continuing that. We have even pioneered many data protection features such as OES cluster-support and deep GroupWise integration. And unlike Unitrends and other data protection vendors, Catalogic has never backed away from our commitment to the Novell family of products, even after the acquisition by Micro Focus. DPX customers will be able to continue to perform granular backup and restores of their Micro Focus OES data.

DPX Cluster-level and GroupWise Support for OES

In Figure 1, the virtual node is labeled as “cluster.” The item “V1” represents the shared resource. Objects oes-lx-c1, oes-lx-C2, and oes-lx-C3 are the server nodes in the cluster.DPX provides intelligent data protection for OES, which begins with being cluster-aware. This means that by using a virtual node concept, where all individual server nodes are represented together as a single entity, DPX is able to ensure that data is not backed up twice (from two different nodes in the cluster), and if a cluster node fails during backup of a shared resource, DPX continues to execute the backup by switching the task through the failover node. This ensures that critical infrastructure information is always protected.

Then, when it comes to recovery, restore of OES data is simplified. The user needs only to select the virtual node object and DPX is smart enough to restore the correct volume. The operator does not need to know the source of the data, or which node performed the backup. This avoids confusion and ensures a quicker, trouble-free recovery process.

DPX support for Open Enterprise Server includes cluster configuration, GroupWise environments, and backup of standalone and shared volumes, eDirectory, etc. It provides the ability to perform full, incremental, and differential backups, and these backups, unlike with Unitrends, can be targeted at the volume, directory, and even individual file level. Then, more importantly, files can be restored with security, metadata, and file-attributes/trustee rights still intact.

Figure 1. DPX OES Cluster

Figure 2. DPX GroupWise Environment

In Figure 2, you can see the layout for DPX GroupWise environment:

• (Po) shows Post Office resources
• (Dom) shows Domain Objects
• (DMS) Document Management Systems Library
• Other objects can include Binary Large Objects (Blb), and even (TMP) which are any other directories referenced by /HOME flags

DPX even has its own software-defined storage repository called vStor that can act as a disk directory for your OES backups. vStor will then perform deduplication and com-pression so that your storage is maximized.

DPX is Committed to Micro Focus OES Support

This school district and this art university are just two examples of the many Micro Focus OES customers who have been surprised by Unitrends dropping support for OES. By no longer supporting granular backup and recovery for OES, school administrators would have to resort to full VM restores, to recover a single lost or deleted file. This is simply inefficient and a waste of their time and resources. DPX, on the other hand, is committed to continuing to provide enterprise-level data protection, including the granularity needed for these school districts, universities, and colleges using Micro Focus OES.

If you are like many others and have been left out in the cold with no OES support by your backup vendor, give DPX a try. If you would like to learn more about DPX, you can request a live demo or even get a 30-day trial copy to try it for yourself. We’ll be happy to help you with the trial and provide our expertise to assess your backup environment for ransomware recovery.

We are pleased to announce the availability of Catalogic DPX 4.8.0, our next major release that enhances agentless backups for virtual environments, expands cloud archiving, and provides immutability for compliance and ransomware data protection. First, please note that DPX did not use an Apache log4j library with the remote code execution vulnerability. However, we have decided out of an abundance of caution, to remove log4j from the supported versions of DPX to eliminate any further vulnerabilities from this library. For more information, please see How to Remove the log4j Library from DPX.

Now let’s review the major new data protection features of DPX 4.8. Agentless or proxy-based backups continue to be the most popular choice for virtual environments, given they eliminate the need to install and maintain a backup agent on each virtual machine. In DPX 4.8, the agentless backup for virtual environments received numerous reliability and performance enhancements, including new customer requested features:

• Single file recovery so admins can now restore specific files or directories from VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V agentless backups
• Support for protecting data attached to SATA and NVMe controllers for VMware
• Option to run only full backups of VDI VMs

DPX vStor is a software-defined backup appliance that provides do-it-yourself flexibility for customers and partners to build their own backup targets to meet performance and capacity requirements. vStor backup nodes can be deployed on bare metal servers or as virtual appliances, with choices of disk, tape or cloud object storage for long-term backup retention and ransomware protection. Enhancements to vStor in DPX 4.8 include

• Software appliance configuration via the new HTML5 user interface of DPX
• Replicate encrypted volumes to the secondary vStor appliances, management of replication bandwidth, and ability to prioritize volume replication
• Amazon S3 Object Lock to set compliance and governance modes for cloud object storage. Once data is archived to the cloud, it cannot be modified or deleted, even by an administrator, protecting cloud backups against early deletion and providing an extra layer of protection against ransomware and data loss

DPX vStor supports a robust set of features for archiving backups to cloud object storage via the S3 object storage protocol. Cloud storage provides a cost-effective, long-term storage solution for data that must remain under a user’s control for compliance or data governance reasons. Besides the support for S3 Object Lock, vStor added more support for cloud storage targets:

• Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage provides low-cost and high-speed cloud object storage with low data egress fees for storing DPX backups. Support for Backblaze B2 includes the ability to set S3 Object Lock modes and retention time
• Amazon S3 Glacier and Glacier Deep Archive supports adds the ability to lower Amazon S3 storage costs for data protection if rapid access or recovery times or backup data are not as critical
• S3 Object Lock for all cloud storage targets that support it, along with bandwidth throttling for cloud storage targets to limit or control the amount of bandwidth backups can use, typically during business hours or for slow links

The DPX 4.8 release also contains other enhancements and bug fixes of course. For further information on DPX 4.8 and earlier releases, see the What’s New in DPX 4.8.0 document and other resources on the DPX products page, and customers with support can access more detailed information of release notes on the Support page. Finally, you can view our on-demand webinar ─ Backup to Amazon S3 Glacier and Backblaze B2 with Ransomware Protection and More ─ that introduces DPX 4.8.

Whether it is ransomware attacks, human error or IT outages, every business needs an affordable and reliable data protection solution like Catalogic DPX to backup and instantly recover data to ensure business continuity. Have a question or want a live demo? Contact us today!

Ransomware is a growing threat that continues to wreak havoc within businesses as cybercriminals constantly innovate in terms of how they are executing attacks. One of the latest trends being seen is that attackers are proactively targeting and removing backup data. This is because if they encrypt or remove an organization’s backup data, then they have significantly enhanced the likelihood of the ransom being paid.

History of Novell Open Enterprise Server

In early 2005, Novell, since then acquired by Micro Focus, made a splash in the Linux pool with their Open Enterprise Server (OES) product. Based initially on Netware and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and later just on SLES, Micro Focus OES is an enterprise-scale server operating system that provides essential shared services, including networked storage, file and print services, identity management, and network connectivity for Windows, Mac, and Linux client devices.

Protecting Micro Focus OES Environments

Now, as you would expect, where Micro Focus OES is a large part of an organization’s shared network services and computing environment, it is a critical part of IT infrastructure. So much so that if services were to go off-line for whatever reason, your users would be out of commission. With that in mind, it is crucial that the data stored in your OES environment be backed up and protected.

Over the years, a wide variety of data protection vendors have provided adequate Micro Focus OES backup and recovery. OES users had some options when it came to choosing a backup provider. However, as time has gone on, those same vendors have slowly moved on from the Novell family of products, leaving many OES customers with no way to protect their data.

Catalogic DPX and Micro Focus Backup Partnership

Catalogic Software is not one of those data protection vendors that backing off from OES backup. Catalogic DPX has provided industry-leading Novell OES backup and recovery for Novell products since 1997, and we even pioneered many data protection features such as OES cluster-support and deep GroupWise integration for Groupwise backup. Unlike many other vendors, we have never backed away from our commitment to the Novell family of products, even after the acquisition by Micro Focus.

DPX support for Linux and NSS File System, eDirectory, and More

DPX supports full, incremental, and differential backups, which can be targeted at the volume, directory, or individual file level. Files can be restored with security and metadata and file-attributes / trustee rights still intact.

DPX Supports the following for OES backup:

1. Cluster configuration OES
2. GroupWise environments
3. Backup of standalone and shared NSS volumes,
4. Backup of eDirectory, etc.

Cybercriminals love nothing more than infiltrating a network, accessing your data, and encrypting it so it can no longer be accessed until a ransom is paid. Typically, the longer the data is encrypted and unavailable, the larger the financial impact. These criminals may even sell the data outright.

Attacks are becoming more frequent and sophisticated. A ransomware attack study from Ivanti found that of 1,000 enterprises IT professionals across the globe, 58% had worked for organizations that had suffered a ransomware attack in the last year! Sadly, cybercriminals have become an almost unstoppable force.

If you are a software vendor like us, you need to ensure you have very robust security policies and procedures in place to prevent hackers from gaining access to code. Because if they do, every single customer using your software is then at risk of attack.

One of the largest global ransomware attacks to date happened to Kaseya, which provides IT management software for MSPs. Kaseya’s VSA remote monitoring and management tool was used as an attack vector to inject ransomware into over a thousand systems via thirty-plus MSPs. This is not the first time this type of supply chain attack has taken place with SolarWinds, having a similar scenario unfolded last year.

We are living in a data-driven age. Security is a process that needs to be implemented with policies in place to ensure that users, networks, and devices are as protected as possible. Part of the security process for your data should involve a reliable and tested data protection solution that will support your organization in recovering your data quickly if it is compromised.

When choosing the fortress for your data, there are five key capabilities your data protection solution and IT team needs to provide to shield, protect, survive and recover from a ransomware attack:

• Ensure redundant backups
  Backup is everything and it is of the highest priority to ensure your organization’s backups can be counted on to recover lost data. The 3-2-1 backup rule is a great strategy for data protection. It calls for three (3) copies of data, on two (2) different storage media types, with one (1) of the copies offsite or in the cloud. With backups to recover from and the offsite copy that ransomware cannot reach, this strategy is good insurance against bad actors stealing data. The 3-2-1-1 rule adds at least one backup copy verified was not locked or corrupted that can be recovered. 3 copies, 2 media, 1 offsite, and 1 verified recoverable. Catalogic DPX is the perfect product to enable 3-2-1-1.

• Granular recovery points
  Backup is must be completed every day. Sometimes things get in the way and a backup might be missed occasionally. But if you are only backing up once per week and ransomware strikes toward the end of the week, the company could lose many days of data. Backups and snapshots must run regularly, or point-in-time copies of data are taken as often as possible. This helps an organization recover as close as possible to the time the data was encrypted or damaged by ransomware.
  Ransomware attackers are analyzing behavior and traffic waiting for the best time to strike. Sometimes attackers are present in the network and have access after recovery, allowing them to attack again. Take this into consideration and set longer retention periods than your typical defaults of  30, 60, or 90 days.

• Air-Gapped and Immutable backups
  If your backups reside on the same network or the same storage system as your production data resides, they are vulnerable to attack also. Cybercriminals have gotten more sophisticated and one of the first items they do is to search for and remove all your backups so that no data recovery is possible. Having backups air-gapped in the cloud or on tape that the ransomware attacker cannot easily reach, helps ensures that your data is recoverable. Further, if your backup data or data snapshots are immutable or locked from changes, they can be used to rapidly recover your data in case ransomware encrypts your primary data.

• Application-aware backup
  Applications require additional consideration if they use a database and the data is protected only by those files themselves. When ransomware hits, it takes several steps to recover applications. Application-aware backup is important as it defends application metadata and ensures that the application servers can be recovered. Conduct application recovery verification tests on a regular basis to stay in the know and confirming that the data and applications can be restored.

• Reporting can predict disaster ahead
  It is typical for incremental data backup to contain fairly small changes between full backup cycles. One big tip-off when ransomware hits (with data encrypted) is that an incremental backup suddenly becomes the size of a full backup. Modern data protection products can track anomalies and report if backup sizes are unexpectedly much larger and alert the backup/security administrator. This is very helpful in identifying an attack in progress, and also sets the point in time from which rapid data recovery can commence.

Data Protection is the last line of defense when it comes to ransomware attacks. Ensure that you have a data protection fortress-like Catalogic DPX that is ransomware recovery ready.  If you are interested in learning more about how Catalogic can assist you in implementing your data protection fortress to ensure recovery from ransomware attacks, please contact us and also watch our recent webinar Protect and Recover Your Data from Ransomware Attacks.