In 2021, ransomware topped the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity’s “ENISA Threat Landscape 2021” report. With data breaches being a “when not if” scenario, companies are looking to trusted vendors for built-in solutions that protect both primary data resources and secondary backup.

Addressing that need, high-end enterprise storage solution provider Infinidat Ltd. recently unveiled significant enhancements to the company’s InfiniGuard purpose-built backup appliance.

“The number one concern of CEOs of the Fortune 500 was cybersecurity,” said Eric Herzog, chief marketing officer of Infinidat. “They saw that as the biggest threat to their business.”

Herzog spoke with said Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the recent InfiniGuard Cyber Resilience: Infinidat’s New Cybercrime-Fighting Solutions event. Herzog described the improvements to InfiniGuard as “focused on cyber resilience.” The term refers to a company’s ability to not only resist cyberattack, but to recover rapidly and minimize business disruption.

Here are three insights you might have missed from theCUBE’s recent special presentation of the InfiniGuard announcement. (* Disclosure below.)

1. InfiniSafe technology adds to InfiniGuard’s cyber-resilient capabilities

One of the most significant changes to InfiniGuard was the incorporation of the InfiniSafe group of technologies. The combination of immutable snapshots, logical air gapping, fenced/isolated networks, and rapid recovery time provides companies with the sought after cyber resilience that enables them to protect data and recover quickly in the event of an attack.

While immutable snapshots and logical air-gapping work to protect the data, the most unique feature of InfiniSafe is its fenced/isolated network capability. This allows backup administrators to perform a forensic analysis and efficiently find the most recent clean copy to restore with only a single InfiniGuard appliance.

“Our competitors right on their websites say you need two of their purpose-built backup appliances to do cyber resilience, meaning twice the capex and twice the opex [for what] we can do with a single InfiniGuard solution,” Herzog stated.

Another level of protection is provided if companies do opt to have two InfiniGuard appliances and install each in a separate location. This allows the InfiniSafe functions to be automatically replicated both locally and remotely on a predetermined schedule.

“We can replicate from one InfiniGuard in data center A to a different InfiniGuard in data center B. You then can configure that backup data set with the same immutable snapshot and the same length — one day, half a day, six hours — whatever you choose,” Herzog said.

Stan Wysocki, president of information technology infrastructure and artificial intelligence specialist at Mark III Systems Inc., joined Herzog during the event to discuss how Mark III enterprise customers are addressing data security. Many of Mark III’s clients use Infinidat appliances for their data storage.

“Having an environment like this means the [chief security officer] and his team can focus on preventing attacks while they’re very confident that their infrastructure team can handle anything that slips by them,” Wysocki said.

2. 180 TB/h performance

Every storage administrator knows that backup is the curse of performance, slowing primary applications, servers and storage and causing frustration for users. The previous version of InfiniGuard had already improved performance over competitor appliances, with one customer going from making 30,000 backups per day with their previous vendor to being able to do 90,000 backups a day with InfiniGuard. With the latest upgrade, that company could be able to do up to 180,000 backups a day, as InfiniGuard has increased its backup speed from 74 terabytes an hour to up to 180 TB/h.

Image: Infinidat Ltd.

“We’ve dramatically improved the performance of the purpose-built backup plants at the core,” Herzog stated. “Now that we’ve more than doubled the performance, you could be up to 50% better. So a three-hour backup window, if that’s what the dataset took to be backed up, now we can get that down to an hour and a half or even faster.”

Faster backup times translate directly to cost savings by reducing management time and therefore operational expenses. Add in the reduced cost of capital expenditure by requiring one or two InfiniGuard appliances rather than the dozen or so Infinidat’s competitors require, and you have savings on both capital and operational sides, Herzog pointed out.

“Infinidat InfiniGuard fits very well in Infinidat’s product line,” GigaOm analyst Enrico Signoretti told theCUBE. “The latest update to this system addresses brilliantly some of the most concerning pain points of high-end customers in terms of backup security, especially in the area of ransomware. But what I like the most is its performance and efficiency that can help users to consolidate multiple backup systems in one for better overall total cost of ownership.”

3. Under 30 minutes to entire environment recovery

The most impressive statistic from the announcement is the speed of recovery provided by InfiniGuard. The claim of “near-instantaneous” recovery appears to be a first for the industry, not least because many claims are based on just M-tree file and folder recovery, while InfiniGuard restores all deduplication data, with the only limit based on a per data deduplication engine limit of 25 petabytes per DDE or 50 petabytes per InfiniGuard appliance.

“Whether it be purpose-built backup competitors or whether you look at primary storage competitors, almost no one talks about the speed of their recovery. And the one or two that do, talk about recovering the data set. We recover the entire environment,” Herzog stated.

Being able to recover safely and fast in the event of a ransomware attack means enterprise leadership can rest secure that they won’t have to pay out millions in ransom to cybercriminals and have their business impacted by operational downtime and loss of reputation.

“Both recovery times and cost can be an interesting opportunity for InfiniGuard in large enterprises: A low dollar-per-gigabyte ratio, integrated ransomware protection, and near-line data availability combined with the efficiency of the Infinidat storage architecture can be a winning combination,” Max Mortillaro, storage analyst at GigaOm told theCUBE.

Watch SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s complete coverage of the InfiniGuard Cyber Resilience: Infinidat’s New Cybercrime-Fighting Solutions event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the InfiniGuard Cyber Resilience: New Cybercrime-Fighting Solutions event. Neither Infinidat Ltd., the  sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: Infinidat