Data Immutability With Backblaze B2 and Veeam

By Natasha Rabinov, manager, product marketing, Backblaze Business Backup

Protecting businesses and organizations from ransomware has become one of the most, if not the most, essential responsibilities for IT directors and CIOs.

Ransomware attacks are on the rise, occuring every 14s, but you likely already know that. That’s why a top requested feature for Backblaze’s S3 compatible APIs is Veeam immutability – to increase organization’s protection from ransomware and malicious attacks.

We announce that Backblaze B2 cloud storage now supports data immutability for Veeam backups. It is available.

The solution, which earned a Veeam Ready-Object with Immutability qualification, means a good, clean backup is just clicks away when reliable recovery is needed.

It is the only public cloud storage alternative to Amazon S3 to earn Veeam’s qualifications for both compatibility and immutability. And it offers this at a fraction of the cost.

“I am happy to see Backblaze leading the way here as the first cloud storage vendor outside of AWS to give us this feature. It will hit our labs soon, and we’re eager to test this to be able to deploy it in production.” said Didier Van Hoye, Veeam Vanguard and technology strategist.

Using Veeam Backup & Replication, you can now simply check a box and make recent backups immutable for a specified period of time. Once that option is selected, nobody can modify, encrypt, tamper with, or delete your protected data. Recovering from ransomware is as simple as restoring from your clean, safe backup.

Freedom from tape, wasted resources, and concern
Prevention is the most pragmatic ransomware protection to implement. Ensuring that backups are up-to-date, off-site, and protected with a 3-2-1 strategy is the standard for this approach. But up to now, this meant that IT directors who wanted to create truly air-gapped backups were often shuttling tapes off-site – adding time, the necessity for on-site infrastructure, and the risk of data loss in transit to the process.

With object lock functionality, there is no longer a need for tapes or a Veeam virtual tape library. You can now create virtual air-gapped backups directly in the capacity tier of a Scale-out Backup Repository (SOBR). In doing so, data is WORM protected, meaning that even during the locked period, data can be restored on demand. Once the lock expires, data can safely be modified or deleted as needed.

Some organizations have already been using immutability with Veeam and Amazon S3, a storage option more complex and expensive than needed for their backups. Now, Backblaze B2’s affordable pricing and clean functionality mean that you can opt in to our service to save up to 75% off of your storage invoice. And with our Cloud to Cloud Migration offers, it’s easier ever to achieve these savings.

In either scenario, there’s an opportunity to enhance data protection while freeing up financial and personnel resources for other projects.

Backblaze B2 customer Alex Acosta, senior security engineer, Gladstone Institutes – an independent life science research organization now focused on fighting COVID-19 – explained that immutability can help his organization maintain healthy operations.

“Immutability reduces the chance of data loss,” he noted, “So our researchers can focus on what they do best: transformative scientific research.”

Enabling immutability
How to set object lock:
Data immutability begins by creating a bucket that has object lock enabled. Then within your SOBR, you can check a box to make recent backups immutable and specify a period of time.

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What happens when Object Lock is set:
The true nature of immutability is to prevent modification, encryption, or deletion of protected data. As such, selecting object lock will ensure that no one can:

• Manually remove backups from Capacity Tier.

• Remove data using an alternate retention policy.

• Remove data using lifecycle rules.

• Remove data via tech support.

• Remove by the ‘Remove deleted items data after’ option in Veeam.

Once the lock period expires, data can be modified or deleted as needed.

Getting started
With immutability set on critical data, administrators navigating a ransomware attack can quickly restore uninfected data from their immutable Backblaze backups, deploy them, and return to business as usual without painful interruption or expense.

Get started with improved ransomware protection today. If you already have Veeam, you can create a Backblaze B2 account to get started. It’s free, easy, and quick, and you can begin protecting your data right away.