Last Line Of Defense

Storage vendors led by Cohesity and Rubrik have over the last couple years moved to add ransomware protection to nearly all their primary and secondary storage technology, whether hardware-based or software-based. The move is driven by concerns that ransomware, driven in part by users accidently allowing ransomware to enter their data undetected, will get past other security measures and remain hidden until it eventually attacks the data.

Oded Nagel, who this March became CEO of Ctera, a New York-based provider of edge-to-cloud global file services, told CRN that the storage industry is moving to adopt ransomware protection because traditional recovery from data snapshots no longer works when customers have millions or billions of files subject to attack.

“Even if you have a very fast storage and huge performance, it will take you hours or sometimes days to restore the data,” Nagel said. “And that’s why we believe that being much more proactive, and actually moving from protection to detection, is the right approach for customers. You want to be much more responsive and be able to identify these types of attacks before they actually happen.”

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To that end, Ctera this week unveiled Ctera Ransom Protect, an AI-powered cyber protection engine the company said is natively integrated into the Ctera global file system, which Nagel called an “edge-to-cloud solution that allows enterprise customers to manage their data and collaborate on data from remote locations to their co-lo or to their cloud.”

Ctera Ransom Protect goes beyond traditional ransomware protection by being proactive in detecting ransomware activity and identifying malicious activities based on machine learning technology, Nagel said.

“We identify these activities in less than 30 seconds and either alert the admin or automatically block the user from accessing any more data on the global file system until we remove the ransomware threat,” he said. “It’s a very advanced technology based on AI protection and machine learning. There is no dependency on specific signatures. ... And since we can run it on the file system level, there is no performance overhead to the detection.”

While early availability customers are already using Ctera Ransom Protect, it will officially launch in July, he said.

Ctera expects Ctera Ransom Protect to be a 100-percent channel offering, and its introduction comes just a week after the company introduced a new partner program.

To better understand the new technology, and to learn more about Ctera, click through thr slideshow.