Availability of VMware Live Recovery Solution

By Mark Chuang, head, product marketing, DpaaS, VMware by Broadcom

VMware by Broadcom is announces the general availability of Live Recovery, a solution that delivers cyber and data resiliency for its Cloud Foundation environments.

Live Recovery is an industry’s solution that combines enterprise-grade DR with purpose-built cyber recovery in a single management experience across clouds. Let’s unpack why and how this matters.

Ransomware and other disasters
Organizations today are more vulnerable than ever to ransomware attacks and infrastructure outages, and the numbers are nothing short of concerning: a staggering 66% reported a successful ransomware attack in 2023, and 76% had their data encrypted. [1]  A recent study of data center outages [2] found that even single-day events often cost an average of $100,000, with many far above $1 million, depending on the data center size.

Most organizations rely on backup solutions with snapshot immutability or legacy DR orchestration tools to address a range of threats, including power outages, natural disasters, infrastructure failures, and ransomware attacks. However, 70% of ransomware attacks are fileless in nature [3], which makes them undetectable through traditional file scanning methods and difficult to recover from. This situation exposes a clear gap in available solutions in the market that claim expertise in cyber recovery and DR but do not have purpose-built solutions for these 2 distinct use cases.

Confident, reliable cyber recovery
With this in mind, let’s dive into the key components needed to enable confident, reliable cyber-recovery:

• Next-gen antivirus with behavioral analysis: to effectively identify and contain fileless malware across restore points, candidate restore points  and undergo behavioral analysis.

• Isolated recovery environment: given the unpredictable nature of cyber-threats, workload validation needs to happen within the bounds of a quarantined, controlled  environment to prevent reinfection during the recovery process. Building, securing, and managing the recovery environment (isolated clean room) is a non-trivial task which is many times underestimated.

• VM network isolation: workloads need to be isolated from each other during validation in the isolated recovery environment to prevent lateral movement and reinfection of the production site.

Until today, organizations had no option but to stitch multiple products together to access the wide range of capabilities needed to address both modern cyber recovery and enterprise-grade DR. Live Recovery arrives to address this business need.

Introducing Live Recovery
It enables a cyber and data resilient private cloud. Along with infrastructure hardening that comes out-of-the-box with  Cloud Foundation, and advanced security capabilities to prevent and contain cyber threats, Live Recovery is a critical last line of defense to deliver confident, accelerated recovery.

Live Recovery includes 2 key underlying technologies: Live Cyber Recovery (formerly Cloud Disaster Recovery + Ransomware Recovery) and Live Site Recovery (formerly Site Recovery Manager). It is designed to address the range of cyber and DR needs, with customizable RPOs as low as 1mn when used with vSphere replication, elastic scaling of recovery infrastructure resources and flexible topologies across on-premises and cloud. The extension of on-premises DR to the public cloud paired with full-featured cyber recovery brings organizations the peace of mind that operational challenges or skill gaps won’t compromise their ability to recover from fileless ransomware attacks.

Live Recovery has following advantages:

• Unified protection: A new centralized management interface that allows organizations to manage the full range of cyber and data recovery needs across private and public cloud.

• Secure cyber recovery: Full-featured ransomware recovery that integrates live behavioral analysis of powered-on workloads in a cloud-based isolated recovery environment, guided restore point selection and push-button VM network isolation into a guided step-by-step recovery workflow.

• Simplified consumption: Single subscription that unlocks the full range of cyber and disaster recovery capabilities with flexible licensing across ransomware recovery and DR use cases, as well as private and public cloud.

The company has a position in the market to enable a cyber and data resilient private cloud. Cloud Foundation delivers an end-to-end technology stack that spans across out-of-the-box infrastructure hardening, advanced security to prevent, identify and contain threats, and unified recovery to reduce the impact from the undesirable (and often irreversible) consequences of downtime, data loss and business disruption.

[1] Sophos State of Ransomware 2023
[2] 2022 Global Data Center Survey 
[3] Crowdstrike 2023 Global Threat Report