Cohesity FortKnox — Data Isolation & Recovery as a Service

Network cybersecurity risks are on the rise with weekly attacks on corporate networks up by 50 percent in 2021. Recognising this threat, 60 percent of CIOs have identified data security as their biggest business priority. While traditionally, isolating data was a complex and costly exercise, Cohesity’s latest data management as a service (DMaaS) offering, FortKnox, offers a modernised, streamlined solution that combats ransomware with a software as a service (SaaS) data isolation and recovery approach.

Shane Piercy, Software Business Manager, Dicker Data said, “We have seen a dramatic increase in cyberattacks following the COVID-driven remote work evolution and increased adoption of Bring-Your-Own-Device (BOD) and ‘Work from Anywhere’ (WFA) models. Today businesses and employees are more vulnerable than ever as sensitive data through unsecured networks becomes more easily accessible.

“As the sole Cohesity Distributor in Australia, we are proud to extend the FortKnox solution, helping remove infrastructure complexity, protect customer data, scale on-demand, and rapidly recover from security threats or incidents. Backed by Dicker Data’s dedicated team of experts, we work with you as trusted partners, and with FortKnox you are empowered to redefine data management and protection requirements of your customer’s modern business landscape.”

With organisations increasingly relying on the cloud to facilitate new ways of working, it is integral to not only ensure comprehensive cybersecurity protection but to also isolate data and speed recovery times by employing a multi-layered approach to defence.

A next-gen approach to data management

As security measures become business critical, many organisations are already employing data isolation and recovery measures to protect against ransomware, disasters, and bad actors. However, procedures such as shipping magnetic tapes offsite or deploying and maintaining remote clusters at parallel infrastructures, are complex, time consuming, expensive, and error prone.  

Cohesity’s FortKnox is a modern data isolation and recovery solution that improves cyber resiliency with an immutable copy of data in a Cohesity-managed cloud vault via a virtual air-gap. Designed to provide an additional layer of off-site protection, FortKnox significantly simplifies operations and lowers costs compared to magnetic-tape and self-managed data vaults. The SaaS offering empowers partners to meet customer enterprise recovery service level agreements (SLA) and regulatory requirements.

As part of a streamlined and holistic approach to security, FortKnox complements Cohesity’s Threat Defence data security architecture, offering multi-layered protection giving partners a competitive edge and market leading tools to stay ahead of nefarious cybercriminals. The solution brings together a range of products, services, and capabilities from Cohesity to better identify threats via Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), protect data, and rapidly recover in the event of a cyberattack.

The 3-2-1 backup strategy fit for the cloud era

Cohesity FortKnox powers a modern 3-2-1 option, which is purpose-fit for the cloud era, ensuring a balanced approach to security and organisational agility.

This 3-2-1 backup strategy involves storing three copies of data – a production data copy and two backup copies, with one being stored offsite. Traditionally, data was air gapped using magnetic tape. While this method does provide security isolation, it does not allow for rapid recovery at scale, preventing teams from responding quickly to cybersecurity incidents, such as ransomware attacks, where large volumes of data may be compromised.

Through Cohesity’s FortKnox cloud solution, customers can simply connect, vault, and recover. Vaulted data is kept secure and out of the hands of bad actors via a virtual air gap that is achieved through physical separation and network and management isolation. This clean data can be recovered from the Cohesity-managed cloud vault back to the original source location – or alternate targets, including the public cloud – in support of business continuity objectives.

Key benefits and opportunities

Cohesity’s FortKnox offers customers a host of benefits when protecting and securing business-critical data, including:

• Secure connection via a configurable data transfer window, outside of which the data vault is locked
• Tamper resistance with immutability, object lock to prevent changes of vault policy, and quorum that requires a minimum of two or more people to approve critical actions
• Operational isolation achieved with separate Cohesity-managed keys (not accessible to a rogue administrator) and separate workflows for read and write operations
• Strict access controls including granular role-based access control, multi-factor authentication, and encryption both in-flight and at rest
• AI-powered anomaly detection, through the Cohesity Helios platform, helps identify potential indications of emerging ransomware attacks so administrators can take necessary actions to minimise proliferation and impact
• Connect, vault, and recover — no need to shuttle tapes around, construct a DIY data vault, build out additional storage infrastructure, or devise bespoke recovery processes
• Rapid recovery in the case of a ransomware attack, quickly identify a clean copy of data with confidence and rapidly recover safely to the desired location — on-premises or in the cloud.

As a value-added distributor, Dicker Data works with more than 8,100 resellers and represents the world’s leading vendors, to ensure our partners are at the forefront of technology and security solutions. Backed by a dedicated team of experts we ensure a comprehensive understanding of your customer’s needs and design tailored solutions.

If you are ready to simplify and modernise data isolation and recovery, you can help customers deploy multi-layered defence against sophisticated ransomware attacks with Cohesity’s FortKnox. Visit the free trial to get access to FortKnox.