Very recently, JBS USA Holdings Inc., the world’s largest meat supplier had to shut down its systems to slow down an online attack. The company paid $11 million to a criminal ransomware gang to regain control of its systems. This is just one instance of a business, among thousands, that has been at the mercy of cybercriminals. Regardless of how big or powerful an organization is, today’s sophisticated cybercriminals can bring it down.
A recent Intel study reported that most small and medium sized businesses had dealt with malware (77%), ransomware (63%), data theft (63%), phishing attempts (75%), and focused hacks (67%). Two in three IT decision-makers agreed that the pandemic accelerated the expansion of their overall digital footprint, increasing their vulnerability.
Simultaneously, the world of cybercrime is getting more sophisticated. Hackers use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to launch attacks. Deep Learning approaches that can guess passwords use Generative Adversarial Network techniques to make phishing look old-school. Making things more difficult is that hackers are turning to exotic languages such as Go, D, Nim, and Rust to evade detection. Even when discovered, expertise in these languages is not readily available, delaying defensive actions.
Nothing short of military-grade defense can stop today’s sophisticated breaches. Organizations are acutely aware that as technologies and trends such as IoT, mobile, 5G, work from home, and state-sponsored cyber war grows, they need to increase their focus on security. Analysts forecast that the security market, valued at $150.37 billion in 2021, will reach $317.02 billion by 2027.
With significant investments being planned, how should organizations strategies their security for maximum impact? Wipro and Intel have created a joint approach to answer that question. The method ensures organizations create a threat defense architecture and bring AI/ML techniques into play for superior threat detection. In addition, Wipro simplifies recovery from an attack using automation for service-level tasks. This helps accelerate vault-to-production data recovery.
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Recommendations for a cyber resilient organization
The hallmark of an excellent security strategy is that it attempts to reduce the time taken to identify, analyze, respond, and recover from an attack. There are five cornerstones on which an organization can build its ability to do this:
Technology elements for cyber-resilient data management
Wipro’s cyber resilience program focus on the cornerstones by including:
The reimagined 3-2-1 Resiliency Principle
It is time for organizations to re-evaluate the classic 3-2-1 Resilience Principle in a hybrid and multi-cloud environment. The principle requires an organization to keep at least three copies of its data—two on different media and one offshore. With distributed IT, data mobility, and increasing exposure to the cloud, it is best to use a solution that offers air-gapped and multi-cloud tertiary copies. Our reimagined approach (see Figure 1) balances cost, protection, manageability, and recovery speed.
Wipro’s Enterprise Recovery Vault (ERV)
Wipro leverages Intel’s technology to deliver a nextgen ERV. The service comprises end-to-end consulting, planning and design, implementation, and managed recovery operations. Organizations use our service to set up their ERV, a clean room and a landing zone. These enable periodic tests and validation and post-incident forensic analysis.
Intel’s foundation for a secure and scalable ERV
Intel’s latest chipset and Xeon scalable processors provide breakthrough technologies for security and performance. The most important building blocks for nextgen ERV include:
a. Optane, Intel’s revolutionary high-performance, persistent, non-volatile memory used to expand storage.
b. A Trusted Platform Module (TPM) with Intel’s Unified EFI and TPM cryptography ensures a trusted execution of the boot process throughout the virtualization layer and the operating system’s secure login process. Without UEFI Secure Boot, malware developers can exploit pre-boot vulnerabilities. ERV uses this feature to ensure safe operations from BIOS to the data landing zone.
c. Intel Xeon Virtualization, where 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors allow more VM density per server and hence more applications with inline encryption.
d. Intel’s CPU integrated memory controller (IMC), a key component for performance with features such as tiering hot data closer to the CPU on the L3 Cache. IMC also increases memory bandwidth and enhances data management.
Core ERV solution
The ERV is built on modern backup and data management (see Figure 2).
The main components of the ERV solution include:
Typical vault sizing begins with the minimum solution and expands to 500VMs, 2000 VMs, and 5000VMs as per the sizing of the applications. The security baseline and governance are managed as per managed ERV:
The Wipro-Intel advantage
Wipro's managed ERV solution allows clients to rapidly expand capacity and run security operations in conformity with local data regulations. Wipro's team uses its expertise in Risk Intelligence, Data Management, Security Management, and IAM to focus on standardization and automation using ServiceTheatre and best-in-class solutions. Intel's technologies reduce costs, provide SLAs for data recovery and enhance security.
Closing note
Wipro’s partnership with Intel provides the right capabilities for assessment, solution architecture, and lifecycle management for organizations keen on creating military-grade security.
Gartner, Innovation Insight for Leveraging Isolated Recovery Environments and Immutable Data Vaults to Protect and Recover From Ransomware, Jerry Rozeman, Michael Hoeck, 28 September 2022
Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved
Mayur Shah
General Manager and Global Head for Wipro’s Data center & Hybrid cloud practice development and engineering
Mayur Shah is a GM & Global practice head for Wipro’s Data center business. He is also a Distinguished Member – DMTS at Wipro. He has a track record of incubating and maturing emerging technology practices. In his current role his charter includes driving overall strategy and priorities at Wipro for DC practice. He has spent over 20+ of his 24+ years’ experience in Wipro being part of niche practices and offering. He has rich experience in strategy and operations entailing building the niche solution offering and new business development. Mayur's sound understanding of Infrastructure Technology Outsourcing (ITO) has helped Wipro acquire new business while handling many deals of varying sizes. He has broad exposure of developing solutions for several industry verticals in both domestic and global market.
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