Cloud-based archival achieve a physically independent repository of your business-critical data for long-term preservation. By its definition, archival is an automatic ingestion process to capture data from your active platforms. Besides data protection, a cloud archive would make it easy to find data and define governance policies to manage retention for aging data. Above all, a cloud archive must provide protection against data breaches. Typically, cloud-native archival solutions, like Vaultastic, hosted on a true public cloud like AWS, deliver extreme data durability, robust data resilience, and rich cloud services to govern and access the data. Here’s a simple step-by-step process of how cloud archival works:
While preventing data breaches cannot be guaranteed, encrypting your data ensures that your data is useless to the hacker in case of a breach. Choose a cloud archival service that provides end-to-end data encryption. After that, no breach can compromise it. Encryption is also a great way to ensure data privacy across all roles who handle and manage data.
A robust cloud archiving service protects your critical data against any breach in security using the cloud’s shared security model to ensure your data’s integrity, confidentiality, and availability. A shared security model delivers security “OF” the cloud using the public cloud player’s advanced security infrastructure. And it delivers security “IN” the cloud by deploying security controls across multiple platform layers.
Great SaaS solutions typically build on robust public cloud infrastructures, which deliver highly available, secure, and high-performing IaaS platforms. These platforms are engineered for scale, security, and robustness, with the finest engineers and technicians maintaining them. These solutions have in-built disaster recovery to ensure business continuity and data durability. Considering the continual advancements in the public cloud technology and the focus of SaaS vendors, you will likely be hard-pressed to create a comparable IT environment at affordable costs and effort.
Multiple copies of your archived data get stored in geographically separate locations in real-time, delivering an endless, redundant, extremely durable archive. This capability of cloud SaaS services not just delivers very high data durability but also ensures business continuity during a disaster. And in the worst case of a destructive data breach on one site of the cloud archival solution, you can still recover your data from the alternate disaster recovery site.
Robust cloud-based SaaS solutions take special care around security since any data security breach can impact all their online customers. Excellent cloud archival platforms deploy storage tiering to push aging data further away from the frontline access, thereby reducing the chances of gaining access to that during an incident. High rigor security frameworks deployed on leading SaaS solutions have an active vigilance system to monitor flows, access, and data movement to catch any suspicious events that could indicate a cybersecurity breach. These vigilance systems are typically monitored 24/7 in a SOC (Security Operations Center), aiming to pre-empt and neutralize attacks early and at the periphery. All learnings from the SOC are sent as feedback to upstream systems to build resilience in the platforms.
Most cloud archival services define role-based policies to control access to data. These controls allow you to define restricted and time-bound access to your users, thereby adding another layer of protection against a data security breach. The principle is that by default you close all and open access to the data required to specific people and only for a limited time.
Popularly known as MFA or 2FA (Two-factor authentication), this is one of the safest ways to ensure only the proper authority can log in. Passwords are vulnerable, and many times, they become compromised because of human errors. MFA or 2FA is a security tool comprising “what you know” and “what you have.” With an MFA-enabled solution, after you enter the password, the system requires you to further authenticate through another device, usually a personal smartphone or a biometric. MFA ensures denial of access even if a password is stolen or compromised, preventing data security breaches.
Why wait for a disaster when you know your organization’s data is valuable and vulnerable. Large organizations also suffer breaches but use cloud archival to protect their data. At the same time, small and medium-sized are vulnerable to a data security breach because they may lack expertise and resources, as per this Forbes article. Therefore, we recommend that cloud archival is the priority investment you must make to make your data safe. Luckily, new-age cloud archival service providers who are not just excellent but, more importantly, affordable have emerged.
