VMware, Cloudian Provide Free Ransomware Protection to Health Care

Source:-https://www.sdxcentral.com

Cloudian and VMware, along with its cloud provider partners, teamed up to provide free ransomware protection to health care organizations. The offers come as hackers turn up the attacks against researchers and hospitals already hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Under the program, VMware’s Cloud Provider partners — there are some 35,000 of them globally — can sign up with Cloudian to access its free software. Once enrolled, the service providers get access to a 50 terabyte (TB), year-long license for Cloudian’s object storage software. This includes Cloudian’s government-certified Object Lock technology that protects stored data from ransomware tampering by making it immutable. Cloud providers can then offer free ransomware protection to their health care customers for a year.

“Everyone is aware of the urgency of keeping health care providers and researchers going right now, and the ransomware threat is something that we saw as being an enormous, horrible thing to have to deal with in the midst of everything else that is going on,” Cloudian CMO Jon Toor said.

Ransomware Hits Health Care Hard
Cloudian, citing Emsisoft research, says 764 U.S. health care providers were hit by ransomware last year, costing, on average, $8.1 million per incident.

Of course, these attacks have grown during the COVID-19 pandemic, and, in June, the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine paid some of a $1.14 million ransom demand to regain access to the encrypted servers. More recently, a woman died after a ransomware attack hit a German hospital and crashed its IT systems.

Last month, the FBI, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned of an “increased and imminent cybercrime threat to U.S. hospitals and health care providers” including ransomware attacks, with at least one report saying as many as 20 medical facilities had been hit by the recent wave of ransomware.

“We’ve seen a tremendous uptick in attacks in that sector,” Toor said, noting the FBI and other agencies’ warning. “So that’s when we put this together with VMware as a way of helping out and giving people a way to protect themselves quickly at no additional cost.”

VMware Cloud Provider Partners
Green Cloud Technologies, a VMware cloud service provider partner, is already taking advantage of this partnership and now offers U.S.-based health care providers 50 TB of its Secure Object Storage powered by Cloudian for one year at no charge.

Green Cloud works with about 300 managed service providers across the U.S., and their customers have been requesting ransomware protection services like this, Green Cloud CEO Keith Coker said.

“Twenty-four months ago, backups were sufficient to thwart ransomware, but attackers now aren’t just reaching into production environments and encrypting that data, not they are reaching into backup environments and encrypting that data to the point where backups by themselves are no longer a sufficient solution,” Coker said. “The majority of customers that are on our platform that this would be relative to are small [medical] practices, and we do have a couple of partners that deal with research firms. And we have seen an uptick in organizations being exposed to ransomware where they really don’t have the protection to restore and recover.”

Cloudian Object Lock
The key to restoring and recovering systems and data lies in Cloudian’s Object Lock technology. This is part of its scalable HyperStore object storage platform. Cloudian provides WORM (write once read many) storage though Object Lock, and this makes the data immutable, thus preventing malware from encrypting it and locking the organization out.

“The backup software applies the Object Lock policies, and what that does it prevent the data from being changed or deleted for a specific period of time,” Toor said. “It’s like a time lock on a bank vault.”

Plus, it’s automated. Cloudian works with backup software provider partners including Veeam and Commvault “to manage the Object Lock policies so it all happens automatically behind the scenes,” Toor added.