Data is an integral part of any organization and hence it is important to respond to and recover it from any crisis. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for data security and cyber resiliency is evident. Cyber resiliency is the ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from cyber-attacks and data breaches while continuing to operate effectively.

In the summer of 2021, Rubrik officially released its first SaaS-based automated Disaster Recovery (DR) solution, Orchestrated Application Recovery. Orchestrated Application Recovery is incredibly easy to use: no need to install new binaries, no need to integrate between different vendor’s products.

Ransomware can be expensive—in 2021, the average cost of a ransomware attack was $4.62million, and that doesn’t include the ransom itself. Beyond financial costs, the cost of time, data, and brand reputation can also be astronomical. According to the IST Ransomware Task Force, the average downtime can be 21 days, with full recovery taking on average 287 days from the initial ransomware incident response. And cyber criminals are getting more sophisticated every year.

There has been tremendous growth in Microsoft 365 usage with the current remote work trend, leading to an explosion of Microsoft 365 data. Microsoft infrastructure and platforms support the availability, reliability, and security of this infrastructure by providing world-class perimeter defense, controlling access to keep attackers out, and detecting risky behavior. However, customers are responsible for protecting the data itself - emails, chats, files, etc.

Part 1 of this series covered the challenges Rubrik initially faced with its distributed database. Our applications had become quite complex to work around some of these challenges. Part 2 of this series covered how we chose a new distributed database (CockroachDB), and how we performed the migration. Next, we will dive into some of the challenges we faced after migrating to CockroachDB and how we developed on top of CockroachDB to mitigate them.

Part 1 of this series covered the challenges Rubrik initially faced with its metadata store. Our applications had to become quite complex to work around some of these challenges. We decided it was time to evaluate and switch to a different metadata store, and started building a database evaluation framework to help our decision process.

Ransomware isn’t just an internal threat for your organization, it’s also a global crime, and data breach notifications are governed by various laws, policies, and agencies. Let’s go over some common cyber-compliance questions about ransomware, data breach notification and reporting, and the laws that cover cybercrime.

Rubrik CDM is scale-out and fault-tolerant. Our software runs as a clustered system consisting of multiple nodes, where each node runs an identical copy of our software stack; each node is equally able to perform operations like data protection and recovery. To increase capacity a user simply adds more nodes. The system continues to operate when a node fails, other nodes pick up the workload while the node is offline. Scale-out, fault-tolerant products are built on distributed systems.

At the Rubrik Data Security Spotlight, we introduced Rubrik Cloud Vault, our fully managed, secure, and isolated cloud vault service built on Microsoft Azure. Rubrik Cloud Vault enables customers to build a comprehensive and multi-layered data protection strategy to be cyber resilient.

In part one of this two-part blog series, we analyzed the UK National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC) guidance relating to backups and data protection. Now in this post, we will examine NCSC’s guidance around mitigating malware and ransomware attacks. Recall that NCSC, at present, provides information and practical guidance in various articles on its website rather than formal requirements or regulations.