Alex Robles - The Bays Techie

Ransomware is on the top of everyone’s priorities. With attacks growing more common and more devastating, we’re not seeing it as a matter of if you will be attacked, but when.

Pure Storage allows you to take control of your ransomware mitigation strategy by utilizing tools that are already available to you.

SafeMode snapshots are available on both FlashArray and FlashBlade platforms free of charge. Starting with FlashArray Purity 5.3.7 you are able to take advantage of Safemode Snapshots. Using the eradication timer we are able to provide a safe haven for snapshots that are inaccessible without a multifactor authentication method.

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How does SafeMode work?

Pure is known for its super efficient snapshots. We’re able to instantly take a snapshot of a volume which are immutable on their own. These snapshots are unique in several ways.

1. Immutable – Snapshots can not be modified or encrypted after they’re created.
2. Efficient – Only deltas from previous snapshot are saved.
3. Fully Functional – Snapshots are just new volumes. Mount, read, write or snap again.
4. Flexible – Recover any volume from any snapshot.
5. Automatable – Set a schedule through policies and give yourself one less thing to do.

So since attackers cant encrypt or modify the snapshots, the next thing is to just get rid of them so you cant restore back from them. To prevent this we offer an eradication timer that prevent data from being manually deleted by everyone (even with admin rights). By default, the timer is set to 24 hours from the time a file or snapshot is deleted. With SafeMode, you are able to set that to a max 30 days for FlashArray and 400 Days for FlashBlade. This gives you ample snapshot copies to restore from.

Now the next hurdle to get through is restoring the data. Another HUGE benefit of using Pure is the fact that we are FAST. Restoring from spinning disk takes time, and depending on how much of your environment was encrypted, the time necessary to restore might not be acceptable or achievable. All the while we can throw more wrenches in, Imagine restoring a production server from backups, only to find out that the ransomware had infected that copy already. All that time is lost. With Pure, You’re able to restore exponentially quicker than you would with traditional solutions.

Backups and data protection in the past was seen as a checkbox that if it existed, was good enough. With businesses and organizations reliance on their data, and the many vectors of attack to destroy said data, data protections is quickly becoming the #1 topic of discussion. Integrating Pure into your data protection solution allows you to modernize your backup and recovery solution to being more than just a check mark but more of a value adding solution.