New Patent Brings One-of-a-Kind Remediation Technology to Compass

Part of the Cobalt Iron blog series

Enterprises that are looking for a data protection solution with unprecedented security capabilities have found their holy grail in Cobalt Iron Compass®. That’s partly because Compass has so many unique layers that keep data safe and so many innovations being incorporated into it regularly.

Take remediation. Countless factors can impact backup infrastructure and operations in a large environment, such as cyber attacks against backup data or devices, security alert conditions, severe weather, fires, floods, device failures or pending failures, and high device-utilization levels. If you don’t take the right actions at the right time to account for all those factors, you leave the enterprise open to data loss or breaches. As any CISO, CIO, backup administrator, or other data custodian can tell you, staying ahead of those factors is a never-ending and almost impossible task.

Luckily for Compass users, Cobalt Iron has a newly patented technology that will ensure Compass takes the right remediation actions at the right time for you. It’s called optimization of backup infrastructure and operations for health remediation —which is a fancy way of saying that Compass will use unique methods to restore the health of backup operations automatically when they are affected by various failures and conditions. It’s a new capability that no one else offers.

Why You Need It

Some individual storage and backup products can monitor themselves and even take simple remediation actions based on internal failure conditions. But existing technologies are almost completely unaware of interdependencies between various components of a backup environment. Determining and monitoring such interdependencies are typically manual tasks that seldom happen except in the case of failures or cyber threats, at which point it is often too late.

What’s more, analysis of the possible impacts of failures or threats between interrelated components, operations, and environmental conditions is almost nonexistent in the industry. Also lacking is the ability to optimize backup infrastructure and operations automatically to remediate device failures, security threats, or environmental events.

What It Will Do

With this patent, Cobalt Iron is rectifying those shortcomings. When the patented techniques go into effect, Compass will:

• Determine the interdependencies between various hardware and software components of a backup environment.
• Monitor for conditions in local or remote storage repositories that could affect local backups. These conditions include:
• Storage device warnings or failures.
• Indications of a cyber attack.
• Security alert conditions.
• Environmental conditions including severe weather, fires, or floods.
• Identify data that might be affected by the device health issues.
• Dynamically reconfigure the backup architecture and operations to direct backup data to a different target storage repository in a different remote site or in a cloud target storage repository that is unaffected by the condition.
• Automatically extend retention periods for backup data and backup media associated with data possibly affected by device health issues.
• Automatically initiate data integrity-checking on data possibly affected by device health issues.

For example, storage and backup administrators will be able to rely on Compass to detect that a storage device at a particular backup location is experiencing device failures or cyber threats or is subject to environmental conditions. Then Compass may automatically analyze the impacts of the condition and take actions to remediate the situation.

Remediation action could include reconfiguring backups to use other storage devices at other locations (including the cloud), extending retention periods of backup data or backup media, restricting access to the storage device, or performing some other backup operation.

Cobalt Iron’s technology qualified for this patent because of a unique combination of capabilities:

• Discovery of interdependencies between various components of a backup environment.
• The monitoring of failures and threat conditions.
• The impact analysis to interrelated components.
• The automated health remediation actions.

What It Means for You

Backup deployments are typically unresponsive to device failures, security threats, and environmental conditions. But Compass’ patented techniques will help ease your burden of dealing with those events by automatically identifying, assessing, and remediating those conditions when possible, making your backup operations and environment more resilient.

Get in touch to learn about all the ways Compass keeps your backup operations humming.