IBM FlashSystem 5045: Safeguarding data with enhanced cyber resilience and recovery

by Jay Smith

Cyberattacks are increasing in both frequency and sophistication, making stored data protection a priority.

With aggressive hackers targeting organization’s data, it’s critical to have data resilient storage systems to protect your business, regardless of the size of an organization’s data storage environment. But even with the best defenses, there’s always a risk that an attack can get through and compromise some data. Attackers seem to be continuously developing ever smarter ransomware and malware targeting both your primary data and your backup copies, making recovery a challenge.

Organizations need a fast, simple, and reliable recovery process to minimize the damage such attacks can cause, both to their balance sheet and their brand.

The IBM Storage FlashSystem platform features IBM Storage Virtualize software, and offers comprehensive data services, including data privacy, cybersecurity preparedness, and data protection. 

The new IBM FlashSystem 5045 now provides the same enhanced data resilience capabilities available on the higher-end IBM FlashSystem 5200, 7300, and 9500 models. These capabilities are engineered to help maximize data protection, security, and high availability to address the risk of disruption due to user errors, malicious destruction, or ransomware attacks.

The IBM FlashSystem 5045 data resilience and cyber security capabilities include:

• -        NEW Safeguarded Copy – Protects your data from cyberattacks with immutable and isolated copies that are hidden, non-addressable, and cannot be altered, encrypted, or deleted. In the event of an attack, these copies can be quickly restored to support recovery.
• -        Multi-factor authentication – Adds multiple layers of authentication before authorization is given to any IBM system.
• -        Two-Person Integrity – Gives administrators the ability to determine what features require two independent users to execute critical functions such as deletion, encryption, or copying of data. 
• -        Role-based access control – An extra layer of protection that allows a subset of authorized users access to specific data on your FlashSystem storage arrays.
• -        Additionally, the FlashSystem 5045 includes IBM’s recently added in-line threat detection capabilities to Storage Virtualize, to identify data changes that might indicate a potential cyber-attack. 

In addition to IBM FlashSystem and IBM Storage Virtualize, IBM provides clients around the world with a comprehensive set of data security capabilities, from IBM Turbonomics, to QRadar, to IBM Storage Defender and IBM Storage Protect for Cloud.

If your organization is looking to better understand its current security posture and how it could be improved, consider taking a no-cost IBM Cyber Resiliency Assessment. 

Protecting against cyber-attacks calls for a multi-layered approach, and combining FlashSystem’s capabilities with other security measures can help you to provide the optimal protection to your business’s data.

 

Additional Capabilities:

·       The new IBM Storage FlashSystem 5045 model now includes an expanded suite of enterprise data services including encryption, data replication and data reduction capabilities, which are all now included in the system price. These included features combined with the FlashSystem’s low-latency response times and sequential through-put capabilities make it a great choice for latency sensitive workloads, like VMWare and databases, as well as backup, video, or other workloads requiring fast sequential workload processing.

·       Support for hybrid storage using both flash and hard disk drives, allowing the IBM FlashSystem 5045 to scale to up to 737 TBs of raw data storage using 24 of the 30.72TB flash drives.

·       Finally, IBM’s Expert Care makes support a simple choice: what level of support do you need, and for how many years?

The IBM FlashSystem 5045 joins the IBM FlashSystem family of products which all provide simple, secured, and sustainable systems that deliver critical enterprise data resiliency services with high-performance storage for any type of workload.

Learn more about the IBM FlashSystem platform and the new IBM FlashSystem 5045 here.