Wayne Parkes, Public Sector lead at Hitachi Vantara.
With attacks on public sector organisations soaring globally, Hitachi Vantara South Africa is moving to help the local public sector build resilience and underpin uninterrupted service delivery.
Gerald Painter, Managing Director at Hitachi Vantara Africa, says the organisation is gearing up to boost public sector cyber resilience through efforts such as its recently launched cyber resilience guarantee, and expansion of its reseller partner ecosystem specifically focused on the local public sector.
Backup under fire
He says: “Forty-seven percent of South African public sector institutions experienced between one to five cyber incidents in the past year, and up to 88% of attacks last year led to downtime, financial loss or reputational damage. Attackers target backups first nowadays, which could leave organisations operationally or financially crippled. For example, if financial systems go offline, the organisation can’t issue invoices, accept payments, or pay accounts. It can cause chaos. In some attacks, institutions have taken up to six months to recover.”
Wayne Parkes, Public Sector lead at Hitachi Vantara, notes that in addition to disrupting service delivery, organisations also risk severe penalties if a hack exposes sensitive and personal identifiable information.
He says: “Our cyber resiliency offering can help public sector organisations ensure that their environments are secure and make sure they have the right backup protocols, storage protocols and security protocols in place.”
Guaranteed data availability
Painter says: “All organisations, public or private, are prone to malicious attacks online. And it’s not a question of ‘if’ – it is ‘when’. When you are targeted, attackers will get through no matter how resilient you are. Therefore, the key to resilience is to build an environment that you are able to recover very quickly. Hitachi Vantara builds an infrastructure that gives you the ability to recover fast. In fact, we now have a 100% data availability guarantee that says that you will be able to recover snapshots within 30 to 40 seconds. This means that every virtual server that is protected by us, you can bring back up within 30 to 40 seconds.”
The data availability guarantee across the Hitachi Vantara’s Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) family ensures continuous access to mission-critical data and applications, no single points of failure with multi-layered redundancy, and if data becomes unavailable due to system malfunction, customers receive up to 100% credit on the impacted system. Hitachi Vantara’s industry-first cyber resilience guarantee provides predictable clean data recovery in seconds after a ransomware attack, 99.99% ransomware corruption detection accuracy and immutable snapshots for secure recovery. In terms of the guarantees, if clean data is unrecoverable, Hitachi also provides 40 hours of expert-led incident response.
Immutability is crucial, they note. Says Painter: “The very first thing malicious actors attack is your backups. Many companies do incremental backups on a weekly basis, and by the time that they are hacked they find their backup is corrupted. We take snapshots of your data and make them immutable, behind a firewall, and disconnected from the rest of the environment. We restore from those data snapshots within 30 seconds, which gives the organisation a near to zero recovery time objective.”
Parkes says: “Hitachi Vantara’s storage, our air gap and our immutability reinforce the customer security strategy to significantly improve cyber resilience.”
Parkes adds: “With that comes pentesting, so we can test the environment and show you where your vulnerabilities are. And then together with a backup service provider, we can start watching and monitoring for phishing and bots, and we can isolate threats so that customers can be more proactive.”
Hitachi Vantara’s pillars of cyber resilience encompass proactive threat detection and response, 24/7 managed security services, AI-driven ransomware detection with 99.99% accuracy, penetration testing and threat intelligence services, immutable data protection, automated recovery and compliance and expert incident response.
Building an ecosystem to support service delivery
Painter says: “We have a long history of supporting South Africa’s public sector. A lot of our interaction with the national and provincial government is through a network of certified channel partners who have deep public sector-specific experience. We are now working to further build out our channel ecosystem to enhance our efforts to engage with government departments across the country.”
Painter adds that Hitachi Vantara is committed to contributing to society through the development of superior, original technology and products and delivering innovations that answer society’s challenges.“In the public sector realm, this means helping the government provide services to the citizens reliably and efficiently. If we can play a role in that, we see it as our duty to do so,” he concludes.
