14 – Data’s Role in Ransomware with Simon Jelley of Veritas

This week, Simon Jelley, Vice President of Product for Backup Exec, Endpoint Protection, and SaaS Backup at Veritas, joins “The Holtz Story" to discuss data’s role in ransomware.

Simon starts us out by discussing how ransomware has evolved to become more enterprise targeted. Protecting data in-flight with encryption, multi-factor authentication, etc., continues to be critical, and now customers are learning they must also protect their backups. Simon introduces his 3, 2, 1 rule to protect data:

* Keep 3 versions of backups
* 2 nearline and 1 off-network
* Rehearse recovery

Simon and Tracy step back and discuss how the attack surface has evolved and its impact on Veritas products.  Veritas has doubled down on secondary data copies being a potential attack surface, recognizing ransomware as a threat, and building resiliency into their solutions. Veritas has also focused on supporting new types of workloads, specifically Cloud SaaS.

The rapid shift towards work-from-home and multi-cloud added complexity and changed the customer’s and Veritas’ focus. Customers assumed backup and recovery was built into cloud SaaS solutions and have learned they need to take more responsibility for their data. Customers are also learning there are new compliance and privacy considerations to manage.

Looking forward, Simon discusses how Veritas ensures customers can evolve with no impediment, building ransomware resiliency using AI and ML to spot threat patterns and introducing privacy protection into backups.

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