August 17, 2022 | By Greg Dougherty
Gartner’s recent Emerging Technology Analysis: Data Integrity Assurance – Can Blockchain Play a Role?, explores the importance of data integrity assurance and malware attack mitigation as an evolving opportunity for disaster recovery providers to extend their service offerings, as well as the ways in which Blockchain technology can support enhanced security. In its analysis, Gartner reported that differentiated cloud recovery service offerings are becoming increasingly critical for survival in a crowded competitive landscape, making credible Ransomware mitigation a significant opportunity for provider differentiation.
Recognizing the burgeoning trend towards improved value of managed cloud recovery services, Gartner drew upon its 2016 Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) Magic Quadrant Reference Customer Survey to explore the current offerings of many top providers as they relate to managed data assurance. While some of the providers surveyed offer Ransomware detection and mitigation services, Gartner reports that market uptake has been highly limited, and existing DRaaS provider data integrity and protection support varies widely.
On one end of the spectrum, many providers do little more than depend upon the data integrity management mechanisms supported by their Virtual Machine (VM) replication agents or managed backups, however, some offer automated backup verification and multiple layers of integrity checksums at the block stripe/container and RAID levels. Taking this protection a step further, a small segment of providers leverage support staff to perform recurring activation of replicated VMs to ensure timely server activation where needed, adding an additional layer of support to their managed services offerings. In this report, Gartner mentioned Opti9 (formerly “opti9”) as one of the few providers to not only perform all the aforementioned functions, but also provide the operational capability to scan server images and production files for virus or malware injections immediately upon file creation or modification, and reverting files back to previous versions upon detection of malicious activity for certain clients. Opti9 was singled out as one of the few providers to go above and beyond table stakes protection to provide customers with best-of-breed data integrity and protection support.
As expressed in Gartner’s analysis, nearly 80 percent of installed DRaaS instances are in small and mid-sized enterprises, a segment that represents the most vulnerable Ransomware targets, making protection against cyberattacks critical to their business continuity. Opti9’s Ransomware Recovery-as-a-Service (RRaaS) solution provides not only fully inclusive, managed, and automated DRaaS, but additional replication of the entire production environment and network, ensuring mission-critical data and applications are always available and accessible in the face of Ransomware or other cybersecurity attacks.
With customized, pre-planned, pre-configured, and integrated services, Opti9’s RRaaS solution guarantees that applications at the recovery site are as consumable to users as they were at the production site, utilizing failback that is simple, automated, and fully-managed.
To learn more about our DRaaS and RRaaS solutions, click here.