IBM Storage Defender product overview

Why can IBM Storage Defender be an essential part of a business continuity plan?

IBM Storage Defender can help you prepare your organization to react on a cyberattack and any other event that might compromise your data by providing an end-to-end data and business resiliency solution. By detecting issues within your systems and identifying malware and other anomalies that might indicate that your data is compromised, you can quickly take action to prevent data loss and impact to your business. If a cyberattack occurs, IBM Storage Defender helps you recover your data quickly so your mission-critical business operations are restored in hours instead of days or weeks.

By planning for the reaction on a cyberattack, you can prepare and practice recovering from an attack. This helps ensure that you will not panic when an attack occurs. Instead, you can confidentially initiate a coordinated response and rapid recovery. IBM Storage Defender can help you create business resiliency by providing visibility to all systems across your enterprise and by assisting with orchestration based on workloads, needs, early threat detection, and proactive planning. Resiliency is not just creating a backup or a safeguarded data snapshot. By investing the time to identify your mission-critical data backups and strategically storing them according to the recovery times and cost that your business requires, you can feel confident that mission-critical data can be recovered quickly. IBM Storage Defender helps simplify these critical pieces of your business continuity plan.

What is IBM Storage Defender?

IBM Storage Defender provides a simple, consolidated view of data resilience status and management that enables you to better address your compliance requirements. Additionally, it provides intelligent early threat detection with integration to popular SIEM tools and enables safe and fast recovery to keep your business running. IBM Storage Defender delivers its capabilities through an integrated SaaS-based management platform, regardless of where your data is stored. For more information on the vision and use cases for IBM Storage Defender, see the IBM Storage Defender product page.

The following figure illustrates the key components of IBM Storage Defender:

Data Resiliency Service is a cloud-managed platform that delivers cyber-resiliency capabilities for managing primary and secondary data and workloads. Data Resiliency Service introduces the concept of simplified recoveries of complex applications, automated recovery tests, and governance of the data protection you have implemented for your storage volumes and backup data. In addition, Data Resiliency Service notifies you if anomalies are detected and with that the trustworthiness in existing primary and secondary sources decreases.

Data Resiliency Service introduces the terminology of recovery groups that is a virtual concept to combine resources in the Data Resiliency Service context. The combination of the resources allows Data Resiliency Service to perform automated test recoveries and to verify automatically if the protection policies setup in the related data protection application meets the requirements for a cyber-resilient environment. In Data Resiliency Service, multiple recovery groups can be defined. Important parts of a recovery group are the protected resources, for example, virtual machines, the clean room profile that defines the environment that can be used for automated test recoveries, and the Governance Profile that defines the requirements for cyber-resiliency in the context of the recovery group.

The Data Resiliency Service, introduces a set of preconfigured agents named connection manager that runs on your data center. The agents connect to your resources, storage systems, and backup systems to gather and send the telemetry information. The telemetry information is used by the Data Resiliency Service to apply governance and to create and manage recovery groups on your behalf.

From Data Resiliency Service the storage systems dashboard and the backup systems dashboard provide a high-level overview of actions, statistics, and resilience posture across the storage systems or the backup systems.

The Data Resiliency Service, manages access to actions, resources, and integrations by using a concept called Access points. Access points are a simple but powerful mechanism for grouping common elements of the Data Resiliency Service. Access points allow security administrators to authorize users to access resources and actions they need in the Data Resiliency Service.

For more information, see IBM® Storage Defender® Data Resiliency Service.

Data Management Service is a management platform that provides global management of all your Data Protect clusters, whether on-premises, cloud or Virtual Edition, regardless of cluster size. You can quickly connect Data Protect clusters and IBM Storage Protect servers to Data Management Service, and then access them from anywhere using an internet connection, and your IBMid or or any other supported identity provider credentials.

From Data Management, the Cluster Management dashboard that provides a consolidated view of all clusters that are assigned to you as a user of your tenant. The dashboard displays the number of clusters, information about your cluster health, data protection status, service level agreement (SLA) compliance, and the storage capacity that is available in the environment. The consolidated summary makes it easier to view and administer your data protection environment to ensure that it is protected. You can drill down to individual clusters and see detailed status for individual clusters. From the Cluster Management dashboard you can manage your entire data protection environment, including managing policies, adding new workloads, predicting storage capacity, scheduling backups, or manually starting backups that did not run.

From the Data Management Service user interface, you can manage user roles and also create a custom role if needed.

For more information, see IBM Storage Defender Data Management Service.