How to Build a Cyber-Resilient Storage Strategy with IBM Storage Solutions

Cyber resilience is a company’s ability to bounce back quickly after a traumatic incident that negatively impacts business technology. The more rapidly and completely a company can restore data and operations, the more cyber resilient they are. 

With ransomware and other advanced cyberattacks increasingly targeting business-critical data, implementing the right type of storage has become a key part of resilience planning. To support cyber resilience, companies need to adopt storage solutions that maintain uptime, accelerate recovery, identify threats, and reduce risk for seamless business continuity. 

IBM FlashSystem and IBM Storage Virtualize with IBM Storage Defender and Storage Insights help organizations build a resilient storage strategy through a layered and intelligent approach to protecting mission-critical data and systems. 

What Is Cyber Resilient Storage

Cyber resilient storage is a storage infrastructure designed to help protect data by ensuring that information can be quickly and completely restored after a cyberattack or equipment failure. Cyber resilient storage also has capabilities for detecting and responding to threats to prevent data from being stolen or compromised when threatened. 

With cyber-resilient storage, companies can follow the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework by identifying threats, protecting data, detecting risks, responding to threats, and recovering information and systems.

Why Traditional Backup Alone is Not Enough

Maintaining backups of data is still important to ensure information can be recovered. However, cybercriminals often target backup environments, snapshots, and recovery points. For example, ransomware attacks have evolved to encrypt on-site backups, making them unusable for recovery.

Companies need to supplement traditional backups using capabilities that defend against the latest attack vectors used by bad actors. Organizations must create immutable copies of data that cannot be modified, deleted, or encrypted. Anomaly detection discovers suspicious patterns in network traffic, enabling companies to stop attacks in their tracks. Recovery tests ensure that recovery points are validated, and recovery workflows are operational in the event of an attack. 

How IBM FlashSystem Supports Cyber Resilience

IBM FlashSystem is a storage platform built to support continuous high-level performance and seamless availability to achieve data resilience. With FlashSystem, companies can promote cyber resilience through AI-powered anomaly detection that identifies threats.  

The FlashCore Module (FCM) empowers FlashSystem to monitor I/O activity and gather information that can be analyzed using machine learning for ransomware detection, helping prevent or reduce the damage of attacks. The IBM FlashCore Module 5 (FCM5) is a 5th-generation, high-density NVMe computational storage device designed for the next-generation IBM FlashSystem portfolio (5600, 7600, 9600). FCM5 features hardware-accelerated real-time ransomware detection, identifying malicious anomalies in under 60 seconds. 

IBM FlashSystem and IBM Storage Virtualize use immutable, isolated copies of data that are separated from production environments and protected against unauthorized changes. Restricted access to backups enforces data protection and enables accelerated recovery. These immutable, isolated copies are called a Safeguarded Copy. IBM Safeguarded Copy is a cyber-resiliency feature for IBM storage systems (FlashSystem, DS8000) that creates immutable, isolated, point-in-time snapshots of data. These backups cannot be changed or deleted by unauthorized users or ransomware, allowing for rapid recovery from cyberattacks, corruption, or human error. 

IBM Storage Defender and Storage Insights enhance the cyber resilient capabilities of FlashSystem. With Storage Defender, companies can connect primary, backup, and archival storage systems for a unified view of all data. The solution identifies restore dependencies and carries out 24/7 recovery testing. IBM Storage Insights monitors the health, status, and performance of storage systems. With Storage Insights, organizations can identify and troubleshoot problems to minimize downtime. 

Storage Defender and Storage Insights both provide additional operational intelligence for IT and cybersecurity teams to create faster detection and cleaner recovery paths.

Building a Layered Storage Resilience Strategy

Cyber resilience requires a layered approach that can’t be accomplished using a single tool. Storage resilience is a coordinated strategy that needs to be carried out across people, processes, and infrastructure.

A resilient storage strategy starts with access control. Data needs to be protected from unauthorized access, whether by a cybercriminal or employee. Encryption of data protects sensitive information from being stolen, while immutable copies of data ensure that information can’t be compromised so that it is available to be used in recovery.  

Anomaly detection supports a preventative approach to storage resilience. By detecting suspicious activity, companies can identify and stop or minimize attacks before they cause damage and interrupt operations.  

Backup testing and validation ensure that companies can achieve successful recovery. Validation also evaluates the ability to meet recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs).  

Through recovery orchestration, companies can automate the restoration process for an orderly and policy-driven approach to recovering information, systems, and applications after an interruption. Predefined workflows manage complex recovery sequences to minimize downtime and target low RTOs and RPOs.

IBM Storage Defender Sentinel is workload-specific software, powered by IndexEngines, that detects, diagnoses, and identifies the sources of ransomware attacks and provides automated recovery orchestration for Oracle, SAP HANA, Linux, VMware, and the Epic healthcare system. 

Reducing Downtime After a Ransomware Event

Developing a storage resilience strategy enables companies to reduce downtime after a ransomware attack. Storage resilience prevents or minimizes the damage caused by ransomware attacks by detecting suspicious activity triggered by the virus. When a ransomware attack does succeed, resilient storage protects backups or snapshots from being encrypted by creating immutable and isolated copies of data.

With resilient storage, companies recover more quickly from a ransomware attempt without the need to pay a ransom. Companies with a storage resilience strategy experience less interruption after a ransomware attack and gain greater confidence that restored data is accurate, complete, and current.

IBM FlashSystem addresses ransomware prevention by focusing on accelerated, AI-powered threat detection. FlashSystem uses automated snapshot policies for high-availability replication through point-in-time copies of data volumes.

FlashSystem creates recovery workflows that support rapid restoration after a ransomware attack. Immutable snapshots, orchestrated failover, and AI-driven threat detection preserve business continuity.

How ProActive Helps Organizations Plan and Implement IBM Storage Resilience

Developing a data resilience strategy can be a complex undertaking. Companies need to rethink and redesign their storage infrastructure to support resilience through enhanced threat detection and prevention, as well as faster recovery.  

ProActive Solutions can use our expertise in datacenter transformation to help your company assess the current storage environment and identify opportunities for increasing resilience. Our specializations in cybersecurity and backup and recovery with a focus on resilience give us deep insights into how to detect and prevent threats to business continuity and build storage architectures that support rapid recovery. As an IBM Partner, ProActive can help you design storage strategies that align IBM solutions such as FlashSystem to your resiliency requirements. 

Need help developing a storage resilience strategy? Ask for a consultation from the IBM experts at ProActive Solutions.