What is IBM Storage Defender?

IBM® Storage Defender® is a cloud-based, Software as a Service (SaaS) cyber resilience platform that is hosted in IBM Cloud®.

The following figure illustrates the key features of IBM Storage Defender.

Diagram illustrating the key features of IBM Storage Defender

In addition to the features described in the figure, IBM Storage Defender provides:

Fast and flexible restores by using local and offsite data to enable fast and flexible restores to recover individual items, complex systems, and entire data centers.
Enhanced data replication, which allows you to replicate backup data between one or more IBM Storage Defender Data Protect (Data Protect) clusters on a granular, incremental level.
A single pane of glass for managing and viewing your data protection operations. From a single interface, you can protect, recover, replicate, and reuse data in virtual machines, databases, applications, file systems, containers, and cloud environments.

By allowing you to manage and respond to alerts, oversee your replication tasks, and manage your data protection environment from a single pane of glass, IBM Storage Defender provides a foundation for business resilience.

Why do I need business resilience?

IBM Storage Defender can help you prepare your organization for a cyberattack and any other event that might compromise your data by providing an end-to-end data and business resilience 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 impacts 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 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 resilience 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 time to identify your mission-critical data backups and strategically storing them according to 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 resiliency plan.

This early version of IBM Storage Defender provides a foundation for business resiliency by offering data protection and the introduction of IBM Storage Defender Data Management Service. Enhancements are being considered for future versions. Today, you can use IBM Storage Defender to view and manage all of your Data Protect clusters and view your IBM Storage Protect servers by registering them with Data Management.

Getting started

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

Diagram illustrating key components of IBM Storage Defender

When you log in to IBM Storage Defender, you can launch Data Management and manage your environment based on your tenant and your assigned user roles. The IBM Storage Defender platform is a multi-tenant environment, which means many separate enterprise accounts or tenants are self-contained in the system. IBM Security Verify is used to manage authentication for users, tenants, and their assigned roles, so a tenant user in one account cannot access resources for another tenant.

When you log in to Data Management, you can use IBM Storage Defender Data Resiliency Service to manage access to IBM Storage Defender or you can launch Data Management.

Manage access: The Manage access platform that is provided as part of IBM Storage Defender Data Resiliency Service (Data Resiliency). Data Resiliency provides a single point of control and administration for data protection applications in IBM Storage Defender. Administrators can use the platform to manage user accounts, see the number of users that are registered, and manage roles for both IBM Storage Defender and Data Management. You can invite new users to join and assign roles for the users that you are inviting. To get started, see Access Management.
Data Management: IBM Storage Defender Data Management Service (Data Management) 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, and then access them from anywhere using an internet connection and your IBMid 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. For more information, see Data Management.

With IBM Storage Defender, you can also use IBM Storage Defender Data Protect and IBM Storage Defender Replica on-premises software, which can be installed for local clusters to improve backup and recovery operations across locations and clouds in your enterprise environment. View and manage your Data Protect clusters and replication operations from Data Management.

IBM Storage Defender Data Protect: IBM Storage Defender Data Protect is a high-performance, secure backup and recovery solution that is designed to safeguard your data against sophisticated cyberthreats. It offers the most comprehensive policy-based protection for your cloud-native, SaaS, and traditional data sources. For more information, see Data Protect.
IBM Storage Defender Replica: You can use IBM Storage Defender Replica to copy and store data in multiple locations to improve data availability and accessibility across a network. Replica provides licensing to allow Data Protect clusters to replicate from one Data Protect cluster to another. For more information, see Replica.