In 2022, over 2.5 quintillion bytes – that’s 2.5 billion gigabytes – of data will be created every day. And IT teams are tasked with delivering storage capacity with accessibility, durability, reliability, security, and compliance for all of it.
Storing this much data is enough of a task. Maintaining rapidly changing data, which most businesses have, is another. Learning to adapt quickly and without sacrificing accessibility, reliability, durability, scalability, and security — that’s an unprecedented strain on IT.
This is where we come in.
Object Storage from Deft is a cost-effective cloud storage option with a critical feature: Object Lock. With Object Lock, you can make your data immutable, so you always know it’s there for you to rely on, untouchable. Start small (or big) and seamlessly scale your storage as your business grows. You use the intuitive, web-based Object Storage Management Console, our native Deft Object Storage APIs, or the Amazon S3 HTTP REST API to manage your environment, and we take care of the rest.
The risk of ransomware becomes inevitable
According to a Pollfish study of 1,100 IT and cyber security professionals, 80% of their organizations experienced a ransomware attack in 2021.
Ransomware threats and disaster events are more prevalent than ever. The only way to be prepared is to expect it. Deft’s Object Storage gives you the tools to preemptively protect against ransomware. With Object Lock, you can make your clean data immutable and, therefore, invulnerable to hacker encryption or deletion. Data immutability — validated in U.S. government certification testing — lets you preserve an uninfected copy for reliable recovery in the event of a ransomware attack or another disaster event.
There is one caveat, though: The data must be clean before it is written. Object Lock will make an infected file immutable, so scans in advance of storage are critical.
What is immutable data?
Immutable data says that once information is written down — be it into a file or database — it should never be modified again.
The value is obvious when hackers are trying to tamper with your data, but immutability raises some interesting questions:
- How do you delete records?
- When all existing recorded data is immutable, how do you correct and update it?
Answering these questions requires a significant mindset shift. With immutability, we need to treat the data we store as something precious, not to be tampered with. When you can’t make changes to existing objects anymore, you must think of creating new objects. The immutable past becomes “the point of modification,” and each new record becomes an object instance. By thinking about data as something that builds on itself, but never changes, we’re able to prepare for the ransomware attacks and disaster events that will touch almost every organization.
A new approach to data
Immutable data also requires a new approach to backup and recovery. As you can’t modify existing object versions, but must create new versions, you have more backup copies on disk. Therefore, immutable data and object storage are often discussed together. At Deft, our object storage cost model supports this depth of data storage and management.
Organizations using immutable data can meet the recovery objective of restoring any two given backups within a tolerance of thirty seconds while having minimal impact to production workloads — all while knowing the data they are working with is correct and has not been modified in any manner.
The problem with existing storage environments is that they don’t track changes — they just store objects or records. When you want to find out about an object’s history, you must run time-consuming queries against the database. This is inefficient when querying for every change that has ever happened for a single item, especially when trying to track down changes made by hackers.
The immutable data model in Deft’s Object Storage platform allows us to store all versions of an object within the same storage space. We call the different versions of an object instance its “lineage.” By creating a truly immutable environment — instead of one where changes can still be made in some circumstances, like many so-called immutable environments — you gain actual peace of mind.
With Deft Object Storage, you can rest easy knowing that the data you have is reliable, accessible, and durable, no matter what takes place within your organization.
Learn more about data immutability
To learn more about data immutability and to see Object Storage with Object Lock from Deft in action, we invite you to try it out for yourself.
