Luminex announced today their RansomProtect product for Mainframe Virtual Tape environments. RansomProtect utilizes virtual air gap technology, which prevents ransomware from spreading to backup data centers.
Typical data protection relies on keeping multiple copies of data, usually at separate data centers. This fails to protect against ransomware, as the network connectivity between data centers is a vulnerability to targeted ransomware attacks. Storage backups made using block based replication or snapshots can result in ransomed data being sent to the secondary site, meaning that those backups are already infected by the time they reach the secondary site. RansomProtect does not rely on block based replication thus eliminating this common ransomware vector and preventing the secondary sites from being infected.
RansomProtect works by utilizing an immutable object store that is only accessible through specific credentials and APIs. The protected backup is not stored on a mounted file system, and thus will not be mountable by malicious ransomware that may infiltrate a datacenter. Instead, a virtual air gap is created between the primary and secondary (or tertiary) copy of data. This air gap can be widened by only allowing certified clean backups to be sent to the protected site during scheduled windows.
Working directly with Luminex’s CGX replication architecture, RansomProtect offers the flexibility and monitoring that is available with Luminex Replication. In most cases, there are little or no changes needed to their current backup methodologies. RansomProtect is compatible with any virtual tape infrastructure and supports a broad array of object storage solutions such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Storage, Hitachi HCP, NetApp StorageGRID, and more.