Infinidat upgrades InfiniGuard Platform

Infinidat has introduced a new version of InfiniGuard®, featuring significant new enhancements to expand cyber resilience with InfiniSafe® technology and double system performance for modern data protection, backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity. The comprehensive cyber resilience capabilities of InfiniSafe technology improve the ability of an enterprise to combat and protect against ever-increasing cyberattacks and data breaches by uniquely combining immutable snapshots, logical air gapping, fenced/isolated networks, and virtually instantaneous data recovery into a single, high-performance platform.

“The new version of InfiniGuard ensures that enterprises and service providers are protected against ransomware, malware, internal cyber threats and other potential cyberattacks with a state-of-the-art cyber resilient enterprise storage solution,” said Phil Bullinger, CEO of Infinidat. “The new InfiniGuard boosts cyber resilience based on our cutting-edge InfiniSafe technology, accelerates replication to alternative sites, and transforms what is possible for modern data protection and backup. InfiniGuard sets a new standard for preparedness in the face of increasingly dangerous cyberattacks.”

The threat of cyberattacks continues to rise. In a Fortune 500 survey of CEOs in mid-2021, 66% of Fortune 500 CEOs said the #1 threat to their businesses in the next three years is cybersecurity. Similarly, in a KPMG CEO survey in March 2021, CEOs also said cybersecurity was their #1 concern. Alarmingly, the average number of days to identify and contain a data breach is up to 287 days. If an enterprise, or service provider, does not have cyber resilient storage, the damage that cyber criminals can do is significant, and it’s the equivalent to leaving a bank vault door open and unguarded. Storage of a company’s data, which is among its most valuable assets, can no longer be considered separate from a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy.

"Cyberattacks continue to be extremely troublesome to enterprises around the world. In recent research, IDC found that 87% of organizations impacted by ransomware in the past year had to pay a ransom to recover their data. To safeguard against these attacks, companies need to implement comprehensive cyber resilience solutions with innovative capabilities. Infinidat’s InfiniSafe contains important foundational cyber resilience elements, including immutable snapshots, air-gapping, a fenced/isolated network for forensic analysis, and capabilities for near instantaneous recovery," said Phil Goodwin, Research Vice President at IDC.

Infinidat has expanded the InfiniGuard platform to include logical local and remote air gapping and fenced/isolated networks uniquely in the same platform. Logical air gapping creates a gap between the source storage and the immutable snapshots, while remote air gapping sends data to a remote InfiniGuard system. The fenced/isolated network provides a safe location to provide forensic analysis of backup datasets to identify a copy of the data that is free from malware or ransomware and can be safely restored. Once a backup dataset without malware or ransomware has been identified, the data can be recovered, regardless of the size of the dataset, in minutes and made fully available to the backup software for restoration.

By utilizing immutable snapshots, InfiniGuard ensures that the copies of the data cannot be altered, deleted, or edited in any way, providing assurance in the integrity of the data. Simultaneously, recovery time is in a matter of minutes, not hours or days. Together, the immutable snapshots, air gapping, fenced/isolated network, and rapid recovery time are made possible by InfiniSafe technology, developed to bring a new level of enterprise-grade cyber resilience to its customers and partners.

"We have expanded from Infinidat's flagship InfiniBox to Infinidat's lightning fast backup and recovery appliance, InfiniGuard,” said Gopala Bunga, Sr. Manager - IT Technical Services and Infrastructure Operations, Hawaii Medical Service Association (HMSA), an independent licensee of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, and the largest insurer in the state of Hawaii. "As we are separated from the mainland, availability is absolutely critical for our operational success. We have relied on Infinidat's guarantees for years and plan to do so for many years to come. We are very happy with our decision to standardize on Infinidat’s family of enterprise storage systems."

“We are excited about the new InfiniGuard announcement. I expected large performance improvements from a technology-centric company like Infinidat, and they delivered well beyond expectations,” said Stan Wysocki, President at Mark III Systems. “What I’m most excited about is providing our customers a comprehensive storage-based ransomware solution that combines air-gapped immutable snapshots with an automated fenced-in network to determine safe recovery points, and then delivering near-instantaneous recovery.”

As part of the new enhancements on the InfiniGuard platform, Infinidat has also increased the system performance from previously announced 74 terabytes per hour to up to 180 terabytes per hour. Not only can backup windows be reduced by as much as 50%, reducing the impact of the backup process on applications, primary storage, and primary servers, but this performance increase can also reduce the time it takes for remote replication. By leveraging the common architecture of InfiniBox to optimize performance and target-side storage processing, InfiniGuard offers unmatched speed and reliability in data backup and maximizes effective capacity for petabyte-scale environments