385 Scality ranked as #1 for Backup in 2022 Gartner® Critical Capabilities For the early part of its technology life cycle, object storage was often associated with data that was less frequently accessed. Think archives and secondary data, such as backups. Why? Both because of its strengths in scalability — which made it possible to keep data online for long-term retention periods needed for archives — and also because there was a connotation that high-performance storage was not required for this type of data workload. It’s now late 2022, and the reality is soaring ransomware threats have made backup (and data protection in general) one of the most mission-critical use cases for organizations across industries. Independent research has shown that 76% of business and IT leaders reported at least one ransomware attack in the previous year — backup repositories were targeted in 94% of those attacks, and 36% of their data was unrecoverable. For good reason, backup is one of the fastest growing workloads for the storage industry. From a storage systems perspective, there are several other realizations: Backups are much more complex than just storing a second copy of data. All of the intricacies of data efficiency, short-term vs. long-term retention, keeping immutable copies of data and potentially offsite storage are involved here. Performance matters for backup and, most critically, for restoring data. This isn’t a light-duty workload for either the backup servers or the storage system storing the backup data. Customers need the storage industry to actively participate in providing protection against ransomware attacks in many aspects: detection, prevention of data exfiltration and recovery from attacks when they occur. And, to restate the obvious, backups are there for the purpose of supporting recovery of data and business operations. What we do has to be focused on optimizing and expediting getting the business back online in the event of an incident. So, while backup/restore may not be considered quite as “sexy” as buzzwordy new workloads like cloud-native, AI/ML or big data analytics, it is arguably the most business-critical. Scality’s long track record of success in backup Scality has offered solutions for managing long-term backups since our inception over a decade ago. Over time, the backup use case has maintained steady growth in terms of customer demand, and over the last 3+ years, we have seen an inflection point. Customers want simple solutions for storing backup data — solutions that offer combined short-term and long-term backup tiers, simplified access methods (the growth of the AWS S3 API in both backup applications and storage systems and services is notable) and, again, ironclad ransomware protection. Across our customer sectors in the enterprise, government and service provider spaces, backup/restore is one of the most prominent. What does Scality now offer in the form of distributed file and object storage solutions that make backup/restore an ideal fit? How about the ability to restore 100 TB of data in just over two hours? Or, for large enterprises, the comforting ability to restore 1 PB in less than a day? In more solutions-oriented terms, this level of performance provides a way to restore your most critical services in less than five minutes (assume up to 200 VMs, 30GB each, stored with 2x deduplication factor by the backup application). Scality storage is immutable against ransomware exfiltration, modification or destruction in several ways: Data is stored in an unreadable format to humans, since user files are split/chunked and erasure-coded into small slices and dispersed across dozens of disk drives. A ransomware actor would have little ability to pull these binary slices from the disk drives and make any sense of what part of a file (object) they are looking at. Data can be encrypted using bulletproof AES 256-bit encryption methods, without the encryption keys (stored off the system on standard Key Management Servers for additional protection). There is no way to make sense of the data without first decrypting it. Our solutions provide object-locking through the AWS S3 API, with retention periods that prevent data from being deleted or overwritten by users/admins/applications during the configured time period. Can a malicious user simply change the policies or remove the locks? No! In compliance mode, even the system SuperAdmin cannot change or remove the locks. Backup with the best… and rest easy With Scality, you gain: Simple management: You can store all of your backups for years on one system. Our solutions can grow from tens of terabytes to hundreds of petabytes in a single system. Restores that will not fail: Scality provides a 100% uptime guarantee. Backup application support: Scality solutions are tested and validated with the industry’s best backup management applications, including Veeam, Commvault, Rubrik and more. Hybrid-cloud ready: If you need an offsite copy of your backups in the public cloud (AWS, Azure, Google), our systems can copy or archive backups to these cloud services. Scality customers understand why we’re a leader in backup. And Gartner analysts agree. The 2022 Gartner® Critical Capabilities for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage report ranks Scality as #1 in the Backup use case among 18 other vendors, including large players in the storage industry, as well as flash and data protection specialists. To read the full 2022 Gartner® Critical Capabilities report, download a complimentary copy here. Gartner Disclaimer: Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage, By Chandra Mukhyala, Julia Palmer, Jerry Rozeman, Jeff Vogel, Published 26 October 2022 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage, By Julia Palmer, Jerry Rozeman, Chandra Mukhyala, Jeff Vogel, Published 19 October 2022 Gartner and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
