News Article
Actifio Backup Makes the Grade for Digital Learning Provider
April 19, 2018
With cyberattacks a constant threat, Actifio provides protection through a data-centric approach and an air gap. Customers can recover to a safe point in time in minutes.
“Every 40 seconds, the bad guy gets in,” said Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh, citing a statistic from endpoint security vendor Barkly about how often a company is hit with ransomware.
Actifio backup is taking a data-centric approach to evolving and increasing cybersecurity threats. It claims its data virtualization technology reduces the data surface area of attack by more than 90%. And its OnVault technology provides an air gap by creating an immutable — or unchangeable — backup copy on object storage, on premises or in the cloud, according to the vendor.
With a data-centric approach instead of the traditional network-based approach of securing an enterprise, “the assumption here is people are getting hit, and they will continue to get hit,” Ashutosh said. In enterprises, “you have to assume everything is getting hacked.
Cengage, a digital learning provider, is using Actifio backup to protect against cyberattacks and other security issues.
And with a new product, Cengage Unlimited, rolling out this year, the Boston-based company is getting a lot of attention.
“With attention comes security challenges,” said Cengage CIO Jim Chilton.
If there’s an incident, “I have extreme confidence they’re not going to get anything usable or digestable,” thanks to Actifio backup and cybersecurity, Chilton said.
‘Assume the perimeter is completely open’
As more and more companies have become digital and rely on data, “the security of that data becomes supreme,” Ashutosh said. Attackers know how important data is to each company, like Cengage.
The ransomware threat also makes recovery capabilities more important. Actifio provides the ability to recover applications to a safe point-in-time version within minutes. This is crucial when attacks are getting more sophisticated. And, sometimes, a company won’t know it’s hit until months later.
It’s gone beyond human scale and reached bot scale, Ashutosh said.
“Assume the perimeter is completely open,” he said. “Focus on the core — make sure there is immutability.”