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Air Gapping for Security: Isolating Data Offline Can Decrease Possibility of Data Loss
Data loss and ransomware threats and worries are leading many IT shops to look at how they could protect themselves. One possible option is being called “Air Gapping“. An air gap means that a device or network is disconnected from the internet, physically isolating it to make it more secure. It sometimes is referred to as ‘data isolation’. It is increasingly applied to backups in order to make sure that backups are susceptible to corruption or loss during a data breach — backups are taken and immediately moved offline to avoid possible future contamination.
The additional security precaution of using write-once media can add yet one more level of security. Once the backup is taken, the data is immutable and cannot be changed because the media can no longer be written to. These two steps of air-gapping and using immutable media are very difficult for a hacker with the intent of destroying, encrypting, or corrupting data to defeat. Increasingly businesses are storing their backups to tape that is taken offline after the backup.
Mike Lamb, product manager of solution infrastructure at ViON, told Meritalk that “air gapping data and isolating it from the rest of the network is a way to make sure it is ‘set aside’ and can’t be hit if a ransomware attack does occur.”
But, where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Krista Macomber, a senior analyst at Evaluator Group, told TechTarget SearchStorage that “these bad actors are getting smarter all the time. They’re getting extremely innovative, and they’re getting better all time.”
As we have seen, CTO of Seagate Government Solutions, agreed and said that “hackers keep upping their game and it is just a matter of time before they add attacks on tape robots and libraries. Hackers go where the money is, and that is why we recently had multiple attacks on small business NAS devices. It is just a matter of time until hackers add tape to the ransomware attack, and I would bet good money that hackers already have plans.”
