You Asked, We Listened: Nasuni File Data Platform 9.7 Delivers Ransomware Detection & Performance Dashboards

May 10, 2022 | Nick Burling You Asked, We Listened: Nasuni File Data Platform 9.7 Delivers Ransomware Detection & Performance Dashboards

The product team at Nasuni is constantly working to make the platform simpler, faster, and more powerful, but our new 9.7 release reflects one of the company’s larger guiding principles: at Nasuni, we truly listen intently to our customers. On the product team, we want to understand what’s important to them and what they would like to see from the platform. Recently, this vital feedback inspired us to accelerate two projects in particular. The first, our new Nasuni Ransomware Protection add-on service, is designed to provide edge detection of ransomware events across enterprise file data. The second major feature, Nasuni Dashboards, makes it easier for customers to monitor the health of their Nasuni deployment within their global IT environment. In this blog, I will introduce each of these features and highlight some of the additional advantages of the 9.7 release.

Accelerate Detection with the Ransomware Protection add-on

Always-on file protection in the cloud, and Rapid Ransomware Recovery are built-in features of the Nasuni File Data Platform. Files are protected because they are continuously versioned to the cloud and stored as immutable objects. In the event of a ransomware attack, customers can quickly point back to previous versions of files and folders before they had been maliciously encrypted, enabling companies to recover millions of files in minutes. This Rapid Ransomware Recovery feature is a true differentiator for our platform and one that our customers very much appreciate.

Around a year ago, though, the same customers using these rapid restore capabilities began asking for more. They wanted a technology that could help them proactively become aware of ransomware events earlier to help their teams respond more quickly to quarantine attacks and prevent further damage. We were already helping customers protect their data and recover their files in minutes, but it was taking them a lot of time and effort, in some cases up to 12 hours or more, to figure out where they were hit and what actually needed to be recovered. If we were to look at a ransomware defense strategy as consisting of three tiers – protection, detection, and recovery – we had the first and third covered, protection and recovery. Our customers wanted to know if we could address that critical middle piece, detection, as well.

Once we understood our customers’ needs, we quickly prioritized our plans, put together a team of our top engineers, and got to work. The result is our new Nasuni Ransomware Protection add-on service, which consists of two main pieces. The first is a cloud service that automatically tracks and maintains up-to-date information on all the known ransomware variants out there – both old and brand new – and their associated file patterns, including malicious file extensions and ransom notes. This cloud service works in tandem with the second piece, an intelligent edge detection layer that operates right at the source of files across all locations to identify attacks and suspicious incoming file patterns in real-time where and when they happen.

The service is designed to alert IT to suspicious file patterns immediately upon infection, with details about the type of attack, impacted files and their locations, and users involved with their source IP addresses. Emails and notifications alert IT to live attacks, allowing them to identify and isolate the problem right away. Then, IT can utilize our Rapid Ransomware Recovery capabilities to ensure all impacted users are up and working again without costly delays, minimizing disruption to the business.

As with everything else we build at Nasuni, our new Ransomware Protection add-on service is extremely scalable and designed to operate across hundreds of petabytes and global locations. In the last update from our product team, we talked about how our 9.5 release would make the platform simpler, faster, and better. Those same themes apply here, as we are making it easier for our customers to recover from ransomware attacks – smarter and faster than they ever have before. But, I would add a fourth member to that group: safer. Much of what we have been developing in these past six months has been focused around ensuring that your file data is safer with Nasuni. We’re proud that not a single customer we’ve surveyed to date has had to pay a ransom to regain access to their file data, and this latest release strengthens the platform’s ability to keep that data – and your business as a whole – safe in the face of today’s threats. Want to see it in action? Check out this demo.

 

Gain Deeper Performance Insights with Nasuni Dashboards

As I mentioned earlier, one of the other exciting features of this new release is Nasuni Dashboards. In the past couple of years, more than 70 of our large enterprise customers have reached out to let us know that they’d like better visibility into the health of their Nasuni environment. We already deliver key health and performance metrics in the Nasuni Management Console with Health Monitor, but Nasuni Dashboards opens up another level of insight.

These pre-built Grafana dashboards leverage the industry-standard Telegraf, Influx DB, and Grafana (TIG) stack to provide an easy-to-deploy, open-source monitoring solution. Utilizing Grafana’s leading observability platform, Nasuni Dashboards transform Nasuni health and performance data related to capacity, utilization, CPU, memory, throughput, file locking, data propagation, and other critical metrics – into comprehensive, yet easy-to-understand, visuals.

An IT manager will be able to bring up her Nasuni Dashboards and, at a glance, visually pinpoint anomalies and correlate events across the larger enterprise IT infrastructure to identify and resolve problems more quickly. Once again, this is a feature we developed because of customer feedback. As we listened to our customers, we realized we needed to prioritize this project, and we are excited to see it already widely deployed in the field.

Nasuni Dashboards are now available through our >Nasuni Labs repositories, and we encourage our customers to customize and share their own dashboards with others in the GitHub community.

Other Features and Roadmap Plans

The 9.7 release is not limited to the two main features described above. The release includes enhancements to Global File Acceleration (GFA) and other upgrades and improvements. Additionally, I’m pleased to say that our engineers and developers are already hard at work on delivering even more exciting innovations in 2022.

We will continue to prioritize our customers’ input and build out the Nasuni File Data Platform with valuable add-on services. The Ransomware Protection add-on service is the first of these and what I can say is – stay tuned for more to come!

Related Posts

March 26, 2024 Problem, Value, People: Why I Joined Nasuni

SVP of Business & Corporate Development Michael Sotnick shares insights about his new role and the industry’s enterprise data management problem.

, , , , , , , , , ,
March 20, 2024 5 Reasons We Rely on the Nasuni Hybrid Cloud Storage Platform

Nasuni Customer John Shaffer shares the top reasons that Greenhill relies on the Nasuni hybrid cloud storage platform and more in his guest blog post.

, , , , , , , , , , ,
March 14, 2024 10X Acceleration & GenAI Readiness with Nasuni Edge for Amazon S3

Jeff Gusky announces the general availability of Nasuni Edge for Amazon S3 storage, which accelerates data ingestion, access and delivery for edge workloads.

, , , , , , , ,