The pandemic has upended traditional data security strategies and reshuffled priorities for InfoSec teams. With a significant portion of employees working in unsupervised environments, outside the traditional network and security perimeter, there are heightened concerns around the safety of endpoints and the data resident in them.
Protecting business data against sophisticated ransomware attacks, and controlling insider threats to mitigate malicious data deletion, has never been more important for enterprises. A number of businesses are moving to SaaS based data backup offerings, so they have a robust endpoint data protection strategy.
The Cost of Modernizing
While the benefits of a modern cloud-based backup solution are indisputable, a lot of enterprises dread this decision because of the costs involved. SaaS based backup solutions – popularly termed Backup as a Service (BaaS) – don’t come cheap. These subscription-based offerings bundle into their prices – not only the cost of their software licenses, but also the cost of their compute and storage infrastructure you end up using in the cloud. But what is interesting is that, when you break out the costs, over a 3-5-year subscription term, the bulk of the subscription fees you’re paying for – goes towards storage. In fact, of the total cost of ownership (TCO) for an enterprise-class backup solution over a 3–5-year period, up to to 70% of the costs go to pay for storage infrastructure.
ZERO Out that Storage Cost
But what if you could eliminate the storage cost entirely? What if there was an offering that provided a robust data backup process to protect data from business laptops / desktops / Macbooks, and even your Microsoft 365 workloads – but you didn’t need to pay anything extra for storage costs? That BaaS subscription cost would become much more affordable.
Parablu’s BluVault is an enterprise-class backup & recovery solution designed for the cloud, based on a Zero Trust Security model. It can perform secure, automated data backups to storage targets in the cloud. Like other BaaS vendors, Parablu offers its own storage infrastructure in the cloud – but what it can also do is integrate with your existing Microsoft 365 subscription – specifically with OneDrive for Business. Microsoft 365 subscribers can utilize unused space on their existing OneDrive for Business – and Parablu fashions a safe, centrally manageable storage target out that space to create a secure backup vault for all end-user data – whether that data is coming from user endpoints, their Exchange mailboxes, or even from their OneDrive accounts.
What does that mean? Lowered TCO – because you just subtracted the storage costs out of your BaaS subscription price.
And this makes a ton of sense because, in most organizations, end-users do not use anywhere close to the 1TB of OneDrive for Business that’s allocated to them. Usually, 80% or more of an organization’s OneDrive storage goes waste because of lack of utilization.
BluVault’s innovative utilization of OneDrive utilizes Parablu’s patented technology and involves creating a secure storage container inside each user’s OneDrive account. Think of this as a ring-fenced area inside each OneDrive account where all data is encrypted, versioned, compressed and de-duplicated. All accesses to the data in this container are audit-logged.
This container is insulated from the rest of the user’s OneDrive and is completely immune to any changes on the endpoint. So, even if the endpoint were to become victim of a ransomware attack – the data in this container remains safe.
OneDrive end-users can still use OneDrive normally and view files and folders which they have uploaded using the OneDrive tool or utility as usual. But the secure container is invisible and off-limits to them. This is by design – to ensure immutability of the backup data and prevent unauthorized deletion or tampering. BluVault still allows end-users to view and restore their own backup data, but through a read-only app – available both via a web interface and also as a native application on Windows, Mac, etc.
A Comprehensive Solution
So, to summarize, BluVault
1. Creates a secure container inside each user’s OneDrive for Business account which acts as secure backup vault for their backup data
2. Encrypts backup data using industrial strength encryption, not just at rest but also when data is in transit.
3. Ensures that the customer always controls the encryption keys – we call this Zero Knowledge Privacy.
4. Ensures data immutability with insulated backup copies that are protected from tampering, deletion, or alteration.
5. Allows backups of all file and folder types with no restrictions on file names, file sizes, folder sizes, special character limitations etc. Open files like PSTs can also be backed up, even if they’re in use by Outlook.
6. Offers network and storage sensitive controls like network throttling, file & folder filters, compression, variable-length data deduplication, etc.
7. Provides a centralized management console to monitor, manage, and audit data protection activity for all registered devices and users.
Cost is a major consideration when choosing a backup solution. But so is security. And no business wants to trade one off for the other. Parablu’s solutions are designed to give you the best of both worlds. If you wish to save costs, but without compromising on security, privacy or reliability – you’ll do well to check out their solution suite.