Sheltered Harbor: Veritas Alta™ Recovery Vault Accelerates Cyber Recovery

Better Together: Sheltered Harbor and Veritas Alta™ Recovery Vault

Banks are frequently targeted by ransomware attacks. Financial institutions are prime targets for cybercriminals due to the sensitive and valuable data they handle, as well as their capacity to pay substantial ransoms to regain access to critical processes and applications, such as ATM withdrawal and account balances.

The Sheltered Harbor solution is for U.S. financial institutions of all types and sizes and is their lifeline to survival in an extreme cyber, data corruption or data deletion event. It ensures they remain connected to your customers and can continue to provide them with essential services, within hours of a catastrophic event that has caused all your critical systems - including backups - to fail. Sheltered Harbor Specifications provide that "fail-safe", thereby enhancing your institutions' resilience, reputation, and customers' trust.

Veritas has successfully adapted its “Veritas Alta Recovery Vault” to meet Sheltered Harbor’s stringent data vaulting requirements.  A Sheltered Harbor validated and endorsed turnkey data vaulting solution enables financial institutions to recover critical data for the continuity of essential services after malicious incidents.

Sheltered Harbor: Cyber Recovery Assurance

The Sheltered Harbor is a proactive measure for financial institutions to safeguard critical customer data and ensure operational resilience in the face of cyber threats.

Institutions back up critical customer account data each night in the Sheltered Harbor standard format, either managing their own vault or using their service provider. The data vault is encrypted, unchangeable, and completely separated from the institution's infrastructure. 

The process of Sheltered Harbor can be summarized as:

• Data Vaulting: Institutions backup critical data on a defined schedule into an untouchable offline archive. The data vault is encrypted, unchangeable, and completely separated from the institution's infrastructure.

• Resilience Planning: Institutions prepare the business processes to be activated in a severe yet plausible event; where all other options to restore critical systems - including backups - have failed. Sheltered Harbor resilience plan enables the participating financial institution to quickly recover the critical account data from the vault and restore two critical services: customer access to account balance information, and access to funds against those balances.

• Certification: Participating institutions adopt a robust set of Sheltered Harbor prescribed safeguards and controls, which are independently audited for compliance with the Sheltered Harbor standards. Upon successfully completing the requirements for Data Vaulting, the institution will be awarded Sheltered Harbor Data Protected certification and an accompanying seal, communicating that their customer account data is protected. Additional certification is awarded to organizations that demonstrate completed and tested resilience plans.

Veritas Alta™ Recovery Vault for Sheltered Harbor

With Veritas Alta™ Recovery Vault’s multi-cloud immutable storage service with virtual air-gapped isolation, financial services organizations can ensure their data is protected from cyber threats with a predictable as-a-service subscription offering. The cloud-based cyber vaulting provides a seamless, fully managed storage option for critical data.

Veritas' NetBackup™ for Sheltered Harbor solution implements Sheltered Harbor’s prescribed data vaulting requirements providing a secure environment for the daily data vaulting processes to run. The solution ensures that critical customer account data for critical banking processes (ATM, account balance, EFT) can be quickly recovered without data loss. 

It is a cyber-resilient solution that enables the recovery of isolated backup copies by disabling network connectivity to a secure copy of critical data. This provides administrators with a clean set of files on demand to neutralize the impact from a ransomware attack.

Key Outcomes Leveraging for Implementing Veritas for Sheltered Harbor

By adopting the standards and practices set forth by the initiative, banks and other financial institutions can significantly mitigate the risks associated with cyber-attacks and other destructive events and enhance their ability to recover swiftly and effectively.

• Enhanced Data Protection: Secure vaults and encryption protect critical customer data from being lost or compromised during a cyber-attack.

• Operational Continuity: Institutions can quickly restore operations and customer access to account information, minimizing disruption.

• Customer and Market Confidence: Demonstrating a commitment to robust data protection and recovery can enhance customer trust and confidence in the institution.

Key Capabilities of Veritas Alta Recovery Vault for Sheltered Harbor

• Immutable and Secure Data: With a virtual air gap, AI/ML driven platform and data security controls your data is protected from tampering or deletion.

• Physical and Management Isolation: SaaS data isolation and management to simplify deployment and administration.

• Multi-Cloud Hybrid Support: With 800+ workloads supported, implement data isolation for all critical workloads.

In Conclusion:

Cyber vaulting is essential for effective cyber recovery. For financial services organizations, Veritas Alta™ Recovery Vault, which is endorsed by Sheltered Harbor, offers optimal protection for critical services. This solution helps promote trust and ensure reliability.

Veritas Recovery Vault: Sheltered Harbor Endorsement