IBM Storage recently introduced the third-party Predatar, which adds backup anomaly detection, automation and orchestration for users of Spectrum Protect. It’s part of how IBM provides logical, operational and physical data air-gapping aligned with NIST’s Cyber Security framework (see my Figure above based on IBM’s).
Today it’s announcing its own IBM Spectrum Sentinel, which provides automated cyber resiliency and data recovery for those securing Epic medical records. It is an end-to-end solution covering the copy management/recovery orchestration and the anomaly detection in primary storage.
Epic Systems is a privately held software company, whose products are used by hospitals to store 78% of all patients’ records in the US.
Spectrum Sentinel gives Epic users improved:
- Protection ,when used with Spectrum Virtualize, by creating isolated immutable snapshots with automated ransomware detection and
- Recovery, when used with Spectrum Copy Data Management, by identifying safe recover points and restoring data rapidly.
Automated cyber resilience is provided by taking an application-consistent Safeguarded Copy snapshot, presenting this to the Sentinel server which detects abnormalities as it scans. If the data is found to be infected, Spectrum Sentinel is able to easily identify the last, good scanned copy and restore the most appropriate clean version.
Spectrum Sentinel is one of the first application-specific cyber protection offerings from IBM Storage. It plans to add others in future for SAP HANA later in 2022 and for SQL Server, VMware and Oracle databases beyond that.
IBM offers its products and services for sale in many ways – as capital or leased equipment, as a cloud-based services, as pay-as-you-go subscriptions – in bundles and suites, etc. It works hard to make their acquisition easier for its customers by matching the way they want to buy.
It has a lot of opportunities by providing automated enhancements to its general-purpose Spectrum range of software and FlashSystem hardware. Although the solutions may be highly technical for it to develop and test, they will be easy for its customers’ IT departments to adopt if they relieve the long hours, stress, loss of revenue and reputation experienced by many to recover from ransomware attacks. IBM has decades of experience in providing storage hypervizing for its own and – almost all – of its competitors’ storage arrays through its Spectrum Virtualize and SVC offerings.