What is IBM Storage Defender?

IBM Storage Defender is IBM®'s solution for end-to-end data resiliency across primary and secondary workloads. It brings together the capabilities that enterprises need to go beyond data protection to real cyber resilience.

Credit-based licensing to bridge silos: Resource units can be used to consume any service within IBM Storage Defender. Resource configurations with IBM Storage Defender gives you more flexibility to consume capabilities and pay only for what you use.
Comprehensive data resiliency to address the needs of modern workloads: IBM Storage Defender provides malware sensors that deploy to your primary VM workloads to detect threats and anomalies. Also IBM Storage Defender provides recovery groups that allow you to test and orchestrate recovery when needed. You can also see an on-going threat index to help determine where cyber events and data availability events may be occurring in your environment.

For more information on the vision and use cases for IBM Storage Defender, see the IBM Storage Defender product page.

When you log in to IBM Storage Defender, you can launch the services that you are entitled to use. The available services are:

IBM Storage Defender Data Resiliency Service (Data Resiliency Service)
IBM Storage Defender Data Management Service (Data Management Service)

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

As described in the figure, Data Resiliency Service and Data Management Service provides data protection and cyber resiliency capabilities managed centrally from the cloud. IBM Storage Defender is a multi-tenant environment, where many separate enterprise accounts or tenants are self-contained in the system. Rest assured though that data for you as a tenant is only visible to you and the administrators from your organization. IBM Storage Defender utilizes IBM Security Verify to manage authentication and authorization for tenants and users.

In the future, additional services for classification, validation, integrity, isolation, and other cyber-resiliency capabilities may be provided for the management of primary and secondary workloads and data. This introduces early detection, safe recovery, and SecOps integration capabilities across your enterprise for your storage and security teams. For more information about the use cases, vision, and futures for IBM Storage Defender, see the IBM Storage Defender product page.

Data Resiliency Service

Data Resiliency Service is a managed platform that provides cyber-resiliency capabilities for the management of primary and secondary data and workloads. Data Resiliency Service introduces the concept of simplified recoveries of complex applications, automated recovery tests, and validation of primary and secondary 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.

From Data Resiliency Service, the dashboard that provides a consolidated view of information relevant for the cyber-resiliency of the observed resources. The dashboard displays the Recovery Groups and potential information and warnings if cyber-resiliency requirements are not met. From the Data Resiliency Service dashboard you can explore all the capabilities and configuration for the service.

From Data Resiliency Service, the connection manager can be downloaded in OVA or ISO format. OVA can be deployed in your local VMware vCenter and ISO can be deployed on a bare metal server. The connection manager is used to connect your local primary and secondary data environment and your Data Protect cluster to Data Resiliency Service. The connection manager access your local environment and perform inventory operations as well as perform test recovery and manual recovery operations by using Data Resiliency Service.

Data Management 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 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 IBM Storage Defender Data Management Service.

On-premises software with IBM Storage Defender

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 Resiliency Service and Data Management Service.

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 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.

Why do I need business resiliency?

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 resiliency plan.