Hitachi Mainframe Cyber Resiliency: An Air Gap That's More Than Social Distancing

One of things we learned of over the past year was the need for social distancing – that in this connected world, disease could spread quickly because of how freely we interacted with each other. By maintaining a physical air gap between one another and limiting how we come into close contact with each other, no matter how challenging, we were able to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. But “social distancing” also has implications for technology practices: Our connected technology makes us vulnerable to ransomware and other cyberattacks.

We have a common goal of protecting our data, especially the all-important revenue-producing data. Traditional device and technology security solutions fail to provide the necessary security in a hybrid multicloud ecosystem. How can we defend large, connected pools of data, applications and infrastructure against, and then recover from, a cyberattack? There must be a way to place data in a socially distanced “safe zone,” away from a production environment, to provide what is called a digital air gap.

Today we are announcing the launch of Hitachi Mainframe Cyber Resiliency to provide social distancing for your production environments, to protect them from cyberattacks.

What does an air gap mean in reality? Hitachi Mainframe Cyber Resiliency provides the functionality to create recovery images for a production mainframe. These images are then held on a separate open storage array which is immune and hidden from a mainframe host. The data within these backups can only be used when Hitachi Mainframe Cyber Resiliency is employed to recover production data. It provides an air gap between production and backup, enabling the rapid restoration of data and operational recovery. Therefore, if there is any cyberattack on your revenue-generating solution, you can blow away the production environment and restore back from your last known good copy.

VSP = Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

You have socially distanced your data, but how painful is it going to be to implement? Imagine being asked to stop your revenue-producing platform every time you want to take a copy of production data, and kicking all of your home workers off the system. This is where the Hitachi magic comes into play with the “At Time Split” function of Hitachi ShadowImage software. This capability allows you to take a live copy of the production data without stopping host access, so your business will never be impacted to provide the air gap.

There is a lot going on in this solution and Hitachi Vantara all about automation and simplicity, which is why we offer Hitachi Mainframe Cyber Resiliency as a service. With this approach, there is minimal impact to implement a solution for you. This offering includes a full setup of Hitachi Ops Center Automator software, which allows you to be hands off with the entire process, and Hitachi Ops Center Analyzer, for reporting, giving you the peace of mind that your air gap is in excellent health.

Protecting your business health has to be taken seriously. That is why Hitachi is continuing to innovate in the mainframe space: We want you to be the superhero of your mainframe.

To find out more about Hitachi mainframe software solutions click here.

Colin Gallagher is Vice President, Product Marketing at Hitachi Vantara.