Safeguard your data in IBM Cloud Object Storage now with Native Backups
We are thrilled to announce the launch of a new native backup capability that empowers customers with an advanced, seamless way to continuously back up their data to a separate, protected Backup Vault. This marks a major leap forward in data protection, resiliency and recoverability for object storage users, ensuring your organization has isolated, immutable backups in place is critical to circumventing these attacks.
Ransomware continues to be a persistent threat to all organizations. According to IBM data, the number of ransomware gangs, the size of companies targeted and the number of demanded payouts all increased in 2024.
Ransomware attacks have also evolved to target critical data stored within cloud providers. Just last year, Halcyon announced the discovery of a new method where attackers first obtain the account credentials of cloud users, then use those permissions to encrypt data with server-side encryption with customer provided keys (SSE-C). Using SSE-C, attackers use their own keys to encrypt the customer data and demand ransomware payment to decrypt the data; leaving customers forced to pay the ransom or lose their data completely. Without proper backups in place, customers have no way to recover their accounts or data once the attack has occurred.
Traditional backup methods typically rely on scheduled or periodic backups. For example, a full backup might be performed daily or weekly, with incremental backups capturing changes in between. While effective, these methods carry an inherent risk: any updates made between backup intervals could be lost during recovery.
In contrast, Continuous Backup in IBM Cloud Object Storage offers a game-changing improvement:
- Near-zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO): Because object changes are immediately synced to the Backup Vault, you can recover data with limited risk of data loss.
- Consistent recovery: You can restore from any point within the Recovery Range, not just from when the last backup was captured.
- Reduced risk: No more worrying about critical updates being missed between scheduled backup windows.
This means that organizations can now achieve a much higher level of business continuity and disaster recovery readiness, without the traditional compromises.
- Backup vaults: A new dedicated resource for storing backups. Backup Vaults can be created in the same Cloud Object Storage instance as the bucket being backed up, a different instance, or even an instance in a separate IBM Cloud account.
- Flexible encryption: Backup Vaults can be provisioned with IBM Key Protect managed encryption, giving you full control over encryption keys and compliance requirements.
- Visibility and monitoring: Activity tracking and monitoring are available for Backup Vaults; the status of backup policies can be monitored directly from the source bucket; and each Recovery Range reports its own health and status, indicating any issues or errors encountered during backup.
- Retention management: Initial retention periods are policy-driven, and retention can be extended in the vault for compliance or governance needs.
Customers storing critical data in IBM Cloud Object Storage can now set backup policies, directly at the bucket level. These policies govern:
- Backup Vault targets: Where backup copies will be stored.
- Initial retention periods: The timeframe backup data will be retained, with flexibility to extend (but never shorten) within the Backup Vault.
Backups are continuous, capturing real-time changes to your objects and storing them in a dedicated Backup Vault. Each backup policy generates a Recovery Range within the Backup Vault, representing the window of time for which you can recover your data.
When it's time to restore, you can choose to:
- Recover objects into a new empty bucket, or
- Restore objects into an existing bucket of your choice.
Only the current versions of objects at the specified point in time are restored, ensuring a consistent and clean recovery process.
Gain confidence through consistent, compliant, on-demand data recovery in 4 quick steps:
- Create a Backup Vault: Choose the target location, encryption options and monitoring settings.
- Define a backup policy: Apply the policy to your source bucket, specifying the Backup Vault and retention details.
- Continuous protection: As objects in the source bucket are created, updated or deleted, the backup system automatically syncs changes to the vault instead of a specific point in time.
- Restore on demand: Select a point in time within the Recovery Range to restore your objects to the desired destination.
With the availability of Continuous Backup, IBM Cloud Object Storage is equipped to support businesses in a world where data is constantly changing. Whether you need to meet strict compliance standards, protect against accidental deletions or bolster your disaster recovery posture, this new capability offers seamless, reliable and resilient data protection.
Start using Native Continuous Backup now to ensure your critical data is safe, recoverable and always ready.