Veritas Alta Recovery Vault Immutability: Greater Protection Against Malware Attacks

Situation

Malware attacks are on the rise across all IT infrastructure, both data center and cloud, and these attacks include backup data.

Veritas Approach

One of the critical last lines of defense against a malware attack is to store your data on immutable storage. NetBackup supports immutability on Flex Appliances, OST platforms, and a variety of cloud storage targets. We strongly encourage NetBackup customers to use immutable storage whenever possible.

Alta Recovery Vault provides immutable cloud storage on both Azure and AWS. Alta Recovery Vault Immutability on AWS is supported beginning with NetBackup 9.1.0.1 and on Azure beginning with NetBackup 10.0.0.1. If you are currently running a version of NetBackup that does not support immutable storage, we strongly recommend upgrading as soon as possible.

Using immutable storage with NetBackup on Alta Recovery Vault requires two steps:

1. The bucket must be created with immutability enabled. There is an option for requesting this on the provisioning form, and it will be a non-alterable default moving forward.
2. When a storage unit is created within NetBackup, it must be configured as immutable. IMPORTANT: If this is not configured properly, NetBackup will write data that is non-immutable, even if the storage bucket is configured as immutable.

In order to provide greater resistance to malware attacks within Alta Recovery Vault, Veritas will no longer support the creation of new buckets on Alta Recovery Vault without immutability configured. Also, we strongly encourage users to create new NetBackup storage units with immutability configured. Buckets that were created without immutability prior to May 12, 2023 will continue to be supported, but we strongly encourage users to either migrate the data in those buckets to buckets that are created with immutability, or to begin backing up to new immutable storage units immediately and let the non-immutable data age off.