In the evolving digital landscape, it seems like there are hundreds of ever-changing conditions that can affect the health of storage devices and backup operations. Adding to those challenges, the threat of cyber attacks is relentless. Prevention is the best medicine, of course, because the consequences of not effectively safeguarding your data can be disastrous.
That’s why we’ve put so much thought and effort into the patented techniques you’ll find in Compass.
One of our newest patents covers proactive technology for automated remediation of cyber and storage events. This patented technology is unique in its ability to remediate system health automatically when various failures and conditions arise that affect storage devices and backup operations. In other words, if something impacts the health of your storage and backup, Compass may be able to automatically assist in resolving and minimizing the impact of those issues.
Why You Need It
Various conditions, such as failing storage devices, cyber attacks, weather, fire, and floods, can have serious impacts on backup operations. Unfortunately, existing backup products do little to assess — or even detect — the impact of these conditions on a data protection environment. Existing technologies lack awareness of the interdependencies between various components of a backup environment. And they do next to nothing to analyze the possible impact these failures or threats can have on those interrelated components, let alone how to remediate them automatically. Moreover, there is little assistance in understanding the possible impact of such conditions on backup operations, especially when those conditions occur remotely.
That means you’re left to monitor and recognize these interdependencies manually, attempting to understand and determine how various conditions might impact your infrastructure and operations. Most data custodians seldom take these steps except in the case of failures or cyber threats, when the damage is already done and it’s often too late for remediation. This reactive approach to dealing with cyber and storage events usually results in failed operations and critical situations.
What It Does
This patent makes it possible for Compass to perform tasks such as discovering interdependencies between various components of a backup environment (such as storage devices at multiple locations, including the cloud), monitoring for failures and threat conditions, analyzing the impact on interrelated components, and automatically taking action to remediate health.
Specifically, these patented techniques will:
- Determine the interdependencies between various hardware and software components of a backup environment.
- Monitor for conditions in local or remote storage repositories that may affect local backups. These conditions include storage device warnings or failure, indications of a cyber attack, security alert conditions, and environmental conditions such as severe weather, fire, or flood.
- Identify data that might be affected by the device’s health issues.
- Dynamically reconfigure backup operations and the backup architecture to direct backup data to a different target storage repository (remote or in a cloud) that is unaffected by the conditions.
- Automatically extend retention periods for backup data or backup media associated with data possibly affected by device health issues.
- Automatically initiate additional backup or replication operations for data possibly affected by device health issues.
- Automatically initiate data integrity checking on data possibly affected by device health issues.
For example, these techniques could detect that a backup storage device at a particular location is experiencing device failures or is subject to cyber threats or environmental conditions. After automatically analyzing the impacts of the condition, actions may be taken to fix the situation, including reconfiguring backups to use other storage devices at additional locations (including the cloud), extending retention periods of backup data or backup media, or performing backup operations.
What It Means for You
No longer will you struggle to monitor cyber and IT infrastructure events and have to figure out their impact on storage and backup operations. Thanks to this technology, Compass will detect troublesome conditions (such as cyber attacks or storage device failures), identify the impacted data, and automatically take remediation actions to validate and further protect that data. As a result, backup data and operations will become more resilient to storage device failures and cyber threats, thereby improving system availability.
There’s a lot more where that came from. Stay tuned!
If you’d like a demo or want to know more, please contact us.
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