In today's hyper-connected digital landscape, enterprises face an unprecedented challenge: protecting massive volumes of critical data across hybrid cloud environments while maintaining lightning-fast recovery capabilities. Traditional backup solutions simply can't keep pace with the demands of modern workloads, ransomware threats, and stringent compliance requirements.

I have recently had the pleasure of working with Christopher Sauer  and Eswar Nalamaru from Elastio™ on a powerful integration that delivers a comprehensive solution that transforms how you can approach backup, recovery, and data resilience.

By combining IBM Cloud VMware Cloud Foundation robust infrastructure with Veeam's proven data protection solutions and Elastio Ransomware Recovery Assurance Platform’s advanced resilience capabilities, organizations can build a secure, scalable, and compliant hybrid cloud environment tailored to their specific needs.

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on IBM Cloud

IBM Cloud for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) offers a fully integrated, enterprise-grade platform that delivers the complete VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) stack. This includes VMware vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and Aria Suite components, providing a consistent and secure environment for running traditional and containerized workloads. Key features of the offering include the following:

• Provision a fully operational VCF environment in under 12 hours with IBM's automated deployment tools.
• Provision optional add-on services such as Veeam Backup & Replication.
• Choose between Classic and VPC deployments.
• Deploy VCF environments across IBM Cloud's global data centers, ensuring proximity to users and compliance with regional regulations.
• Leverage IBM Cloud's security features, including Hyper Protect Crypto Services and FIPS 140-2 Level 4 key management, to protect sensitive data.
• Integrate with IBM Cloud Services such as Security and Compliance Center Workload Protection and IBM Cloud Logs. 

Data Protection with Veeam Backup & Replication

Veeam Backup & Replication provides comprehensive data protection and disaster recovery solutions for VMware environments. Fully compatible with IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, Veeam ensures that your workloads are safeguarded against data loss and downtime. Integration highlights include the following:

• Veeam integrates directly with VMware vSphere environments on IBM Cloud, offering the same level of functionality as on-premises deployments.
• Utilize features like Instant VM Recovery, SureBackup, constant data protection to meet stringent RTO and RPO requirements.
• Scale your backup infrastructure in tandem with your VCF environment, ensuring consistent performance and protection.
• Extend data protection across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, facilitating seamless workload mobility and disaster recovery.

Enhancing Resilience with Elastio

Elastio's Ransomware Recovery Assurance Platform offers advanced protection for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environments on IBM Cloud when integrated with Veeam Backup & Replication. This integration provides proactive ransomware detection, ensuring data integrity and facilitating rapid recovery. Key features include the following:

• Elastio seamlessly integrates with Veeam without requiring agents, preserving system performance and simplifying deployment.
• The platform inspects Veeam backup data at scale to identify ransomware encryptions as soon as the data is backed up, enabling swift response to threats.
• Elastio scans for malware binaries, helping prevent ransomware attacks before they impact business operations.
• By tracking changes across backups, Elastio detects sophisticated attacks that evolve over time, providing a robust defense against evolving ransomware threats.
• Older or previously unscanned backups can be examined to ensure they are ransomware-free before recovery, adding an extra layer of security.
• Developed from reverse-engineering over 2,300 ransomware families, Elastio achieves 99.99% accuracy in detecting unknown ransomware encryptions.
• Organizations can confidently restore critical business processes with clean, ransomware-free data, reducing downtime and operational impact.
• Continuous scanning of every backup allows for immediate threat identification, ensuring that data remains uncompromised.
• Elastio provides meaningful alerts to focus on genuine threats, reducing false positives and enhancing response efficiency.
• The platform fits effortlessly into existing backup processes without operational disruption, maintaining business continuity.

By combining Elastio's advanced ransomware detection capabilities with Veeam's robust backup solutions, organizations can enhance their data protection strategies, ensuring resilience against sophisticated cyber threats.

Getting Started

1. Provision a VCF instance on IBM Cloud - Use the IBM Cloud portal to deploy your VCF environment, selecting the appropriate configuration for your workloads.
2. Integrate Veeam Backup & Replication - Configure Veeam within your VCF instance to establish backup and recovery processes.
3. Deploy Elastio - Set up Elastio to integrate with Veeam Backup & Replication to provide continuous data protection and enhance your resilience against data threats.
4. Monitor and Manage - Utilize IBM Cloud's monitoring tools alongside Veeam and Elastio dashboards to oversee your environment's health and compliance.

Cyber resilience with Elastio overview

The following diagram shows the high-level architecture:

When you purchase the the Elastio Ransomware Recovery Assurance Platform service, a resilient Elastio Cloud Connector is instantiated in the Elastio managed AWS Account. The details of this Cloud Connector are sent to you to enable you to configure your Elastio Stack.

The Elastio Stack is delivered as a lightweight Open Virtual Appliance (OVA), designed for scale-out scanning within VMware infrastructures. This architecture is simple to deploy, requiring minimal management, and operates efficiently with low resource usage. Using the OVA an initial Worker VM is deployed hosting the Controller and a Scan Worker. Additional Worker nodes with Scan Workers can be added for scaling purposes.

The Controller interfaces with the Veeam Backup & Replication server’s API to get the servers backup inventory and to issue mount requests. Once the requested backup is mounted it can be scanned by a Scan Worker.

All ransomware and data integrity scans are performed entirely within the VCF instance, ensuring that sensitive data never leaves your environment, maintaining full security and compliance.

Elastio supports automatic updates to its ransomware detection models and scanning engines, ensuring continuous protection against the latest threats without manual intervention.

The Elastio stack operates without requiring agents on workload virtual machines, preserving system performance and reducing complexity while delivering comprehensive backup scanning and validation.

Job status and scan results are sent to your the Elastio Ransomware Recovery Assurance Platform console, offering detailed insights into data integrity, ransomware resilience, and recovery readiness. This centralized reporting enables organizations to proactively monitor and enhance their security posture.

Summary

The integration of IBM Cloud VCF, Veeam, and Elastio represents more than just a technical solution—it's a strategic transformation that empowers organizations to confidently navigate the digital future. By combining enterprise-grade infrastructure, proven backup expertise, and cloud innovation, this trio delivers unparalleled data protection capabilities.