This post was originally published on Pure Storage
This is part one in a series about air gaps and resiliency architectures. Read part two: Without A Tiered Backup Architecture, Are You Truly Resilient?
Ransomware attackers are ruthless opportunists—but that doesn’t mean we should make their jobs any easier.
Take the attack on Colonial Pipelines’ back offices. The critical gas and fuel infrastructure was offline for more than four days. An investigation revealed that big lapses in security made it “fairly easy” to break in.
We should be making life as hard as possible for hackers. Thankfully, there’s an arsenal of technologies and architecture paradigms to do just that. One of these approaches is called “air gaps”—but are they a silver bullet for cyber resilience?
What Is an Air Gap?
Is an air gap a must-have, marketing lingo, or both? Let’s take a look.
Traditionally, an air gap was physical, using tape-based backups or offsite systems, separated with zero physical connectivity. Administrators create a connection between the production system and air-gapped system, like a drawbridge. The bridge goes down when data is transferred, then goes back up the rest of the time.
Today, the definition and concept of “air gaps” is evolving past the traditional “physical network isolation”
— Read the rest of this post, which was originally published on Pure Storage.