Understanding the Difference Between Air Gapping and Immutable Storage

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, protecting critical data from cyber threats is paramount. Two key strategies in this domain are virtual air gapping and immutable storage. Both play crucial roles in safeguarding data, but they operate differently.

What is Air Gapping?

Air gapping refers to the practice of isolating data or systems in such a way that they are not directly accessible from unsecured networks. This method provides a logical separation, creating a secure environment that is highly resistant to cyber threats.

The Air Gap Protect Difference

When looking for the right air gap protection it’s imperative to find a solution that leverages a hardened, multi-layered approach to ransomware readiness, embodying the principles of virtual air gapping. Here are some key features:

• Hardened Security: Utilize robust controls to prevent threats and ensure data is highly available and recoverable from cyberattacks.
• Immutable, Air-Gapped Data Copies: Data copies are both immutable (unchangeable) and air-gapped, meaning they are isolated from the main network to prevent unauthorized access.
• Advanced Anomaly Detection: Built-in mechanisms detect unusual activities, signaling potential cyber threats before they cause damage.
• Built-in Encryption: Comprehensive encryption protects data at rest and in transit, adding an extra layer of security.
• Cloud Integration: Built on a public cloud that offers durability, security, scalability, and performance, protecting business data from evolving cyber threats.

What is Immutable Storage?

Immutable storage refers to data storage systems where once data is written, it cannot be altered or deleted. This immutability ensures that data remains in its original state, providing a reliable way to preserve data integrity and prevent tampering.

Key Differences

1. Isolation vs. Immutability:
   • Air Gapping: Focuses on isolating data from unsecured networks to prevent unauthorized access. It's about creating a secure, isolated environment.
   • Immutable Storage: Ensures that data, once written, cannot be altered or deleted. It's about preserving data integrity over time.
2. Use Cases:
   • Air Gapping: Ideal for scenarios requiring stringent access controls and isolation, such as protecting sensitive corporate data from ransomware attacks.
   • Immutable Storage: Suited for legal compliance, archival purposes, and environments where data integrity is critical.
3. Implementation:
   • Air Gapping: Implemented through logical separation and network segmentation, often combined with advanced security measures like anomaly detection and encryption.
   • Immutable Storage: Achieved through write-once-read-many (WORM) technologies, ensuring that data cannot be altered after being written.

Addressing Cloud-Based Ransomware Protection Challenges

As organizations increasingly adopt cloud storage, several challenges arise:

• Increasing Costs: Managing and optimizing costs as cloud usage expands is crucial.
• Reliable Ransomware Protection: Ensuring data is securely air-gapped and offsite to prevent ransomware from accessing and encrypting valuable data.
• Trusted Backup and Recoverability: Maintaining reliable backup and recovery solutions to protect an organization’s most valuable asset—its data.

Both virtual air gapping and immutable storage are essential components of a comprehensive cyber resilience strategy. By understanding their differences and applications, organizations can better safeguard their critical data from cyber threats.

Your Next Step to Becoming Cyber Resilient

Meridian IT and Commvault have teamed up to create a solution that ensures your company is cyber resilient. True cyber resilience starts before the attack and it never ends. It’s an ongoing process across practices to understand your risk profile and improve your data security posture. This process includes ensuring readiness with early warning of attacks and ransomware infections, the ability to validate clean recovery points, and testing recovery before a cyber event. When it’s time to recover, it’s crucial to have a bulletproof, predictable, and frictionless recovery at any scale.

How do you achieve this? By ensuring you have a team of experts that can help you shift from merely protecting your data through backups to instituting a three-pronged approach for cyber resilience. This approach focuses on your risk profile, ensures your readiness for an attack, and guarantees your recovery is as quick as possible. Integral to this strategy are air gapping and immutable storage, which provide advanced layers of security for your data.

Meridian’s mProtect solution enables you to do just that. By leveraging Commvault’s best-in-class suite of cyber resilience software, our team of experts will conduct continuous data scanning, risk assessments, and remediation plans to analyze your risk profile. They will ensure you’re ready for any type of attack through early warnings, threat detection, and recovery testing. Your backups are secured, encrypted, air-gapped, and immutable, leveraging a robust ecosystem of integrations. Air gapping isolates your data from the network, preventing unauthorized access, while immutable storage ensures that your backups cannot be altered or deleted, providing an additional safeguard against ransomware attacks.

All this is provided through a simplified, flexible monthly consumption model that bundles Commvault software, Meridian managed services, and optional hardware. With these measures in place, you can rest assured that your data is protected and your business is prepared to handle any cyber threat. Ready to get started? Learn more now.