Last line defence

Ransomware attacks continue to cripple businesses and government organisations alike – with hospitals in particular hit hard in recent months. Analyst firm IDC warns that growing amounts of data held by organisations are becoming an increasingly attractive target for hackers. Being forced offline means interruption to day-to-day operations – and recovering from ransomware attacks takes time and money, as well as causing damage to an organisation’s reputation.

Recognising that just one targeted malware email can lead to entire systems becoming compromised and encrypted by a rogue attacker, Fujitsu is focusing on providing a failsafe line of defence: automated regular backups for critical business data. When encrypted backups are stored offline, they are out of reach of hackers, and provide a last line of defence against ransomware and other cyber-attacks. What’s more, magnetic tape-based systems provide a reliable, proven and cost-efficient option for off-premises, as well as second tier data storage and long-term archiving.

Fujitsu’s most scalable and flexible solution for small to medium-sized environments, the new ETERNUS LT140 is the latest addition to the Fujitsu Storage ETERNUS family. It offers effective, long-term data protection and disaster recovery strategies. ETERNUS LT140 is a future-ready tape system that combines the enterprise-class performance of the latest, industry standard Linear Tape Open (LTO) technology, LTO-8, with a highly modular design to meet fast-expanding storage, backup and archiving needs.

Fujitsu ETERNUS LT140 allows businesses to add extra storage capacity on a pay-as-you-grow basis by increasing the number of tape cartridges and drives, and scales up to 8.4 Petabytes of data – enough to protect every email, document and database.

Highly automated, simple and remote operation features make ETERNUS LT140 suitable for use in remote sites, where organisations usually do not have tech know-how to hand. Compatible with LTFS (Linear Tape File System), the system provides a graphical interface to storage folders and files, enabling efficient access to tape content just as if the data was held on disk or flash storage. LTO-8 technology with hardware-based data encryption^² enhances security and compliance while ensuring high capacity, high speed and low storage costs. Like all Fujitsu ETERNUS LT systems, ETERNUS LT140 supports the WORM (Write Once, Read Many) protocol – which means that data is held in a non-erasable, non-rewritable format – safely out of the reach of even the most malicious malware.

Olivier Delachapelle, Head of Data Centre Category Management at Fujitsu EMEIA, says: “Being hit by ransomware and other forms of malware can cause serious damage not just to an organisation’s reputation, but also lead to costs associated with extended downtime that mount up on an hourly basis. Keeping encrypted backups offline, on tape, is a simple step to maintain the accessibility of critical data at all times, and something that helps organisations get back up and running fast after disaster strikes. Our high-capacity tape libraries should be an essential part of any 3-2-1 data protection strategy: keep at least three copies of data, store two backup copies on different storage media, and store one offline.”