Iron Cloud Secure Offline Storage (SOS) ransomware recovery

Solution Guides

Ransomware attacks are no longer something you just read about; these events are happening far too often. To evolve with the ever-expanding security risks, IT leaders need to rethink how to protect growing archives of data as well as the hardware and systems used to manage it.

June 17, 20216 mins

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Iron Cloud Secure Offline Storage Ransomware - Use air-gapped, cold storage to recover from ransomware

Use cold storage to protect data against ransomware

Business challenge

But, storing all of your data in the cloud is expensive, especially since most data is inactive. A cold storage option lets you easily move a gold copy of your data — from the cloud or spinning disk — offline to cost-effective, air-gapped tape where it is safe from ransomware attacks and, if disaster strikes, can be used to recover.

Iron Cloud solution

What if you could:

Increase data security and protect against from ransomware
Follow best practices for data backup and archiving while also reducing costs, complexity and risk
Modernize data protection for long-term retention and compliance

Iron Cloud Secure Offline Storage

Because it can be difficult to isolate data on your own, Iron Mountain’s Iron Cloud Secure Offline Storage (SOS) is an ultra-low cost, fully managed solution for inactive data that helps you create a gold copy of your data so it can be protected against ransomware and other cybersecurity threats.

Offline data is safely kept in a climate-controlled vault, physically isolated from unsecured networks and quickly recoverable based on SLAs. This cold storage approach also decreases your storage costs and ensures long-term archival data compliance, while retaining options for fast cloud-based retrieval whenever needed. If you do have to respond to a ransomware attack, this offline, gold copy of your data can serve as an uncorrupted data recovery point.

With our Vault Lock option, you can also leverage multi-factor authentication for offsite data retrieval to ensure ultimate protection. This prevents un-authorized data access, even if credentials for your backup application have been compromised.

Industry fact

47%
In 2020, the severity of ransomware attacks increased 47%, with a 100% spike in the number of attacks.
Department of the Treasury, Advisory on Potential Sanctions Risks for Facilitating Ransomware Payments, October 1, 2020

How it works

Inactive data can be stored offline using a mix of cloud and tape, so data is retrievable via the cloud but secured in air-gapped, cost-effective cold storage. Here’s how it works:

1. Data is uploaded from your storage devices (cloud, hard drive, spinning disk, etc.) to a secure object bucket in the Iron Cloud.

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest.
Iron Mountain migrates inactive data from the secure object bucket to air-gapped tape, so it is protected offline and is not connected to any network.

2. Offline data is only brought back online by requesting the data from the secure object bucket and then completing a multi-factor authentication process. No data is brought back online until the multi-factor authentication process is successful.

Iron Cloud Secure Offline Storage workflow

Case study

An organization needed a compliant way to audit cloud backups to validate recovery in the event of a disaster or other trigger event. Iron Cloud SOS provided a way to replicate a third copy of the organization’s data to validate the restore and recovery process as well as improve the organization’s cloud storage infrastructure, networking and bandwidth with an estimated savings of $120K annually. This approach also ensured compliance with data retention policies.

What you gain

By using air-gapped, offline storage that is not connected to a network for your inactive data, Iron Cloud SOS protects you against catastrophes such as ransomware and data breaches, where recovery is otherwise expensive and time consuming. By placing inactive data on a cost-effective storage tier, and since Iron Mountain doesn’t charge egress fees, you can also make your data more portable, take control of the unstructured data created by your organization and improve compliance with long-term retention policies. Our technology agnostic approach also means we can work with your cloud providers to create a data management strategy based on your requirements.