Ransomware attacks are increasing at an exponential rate. Backup environments are popular targets for ransomware attacks. There can be various reasons when the backup copies can be modified or deleted. When it comes to protecting your data in the event of a ransomware attack, snapshots are critical components of your organization’s business strategy and data recovery plan.

Organizations can enable Data Lock to prevent modification, deletion, or tampering of business-critical data and make it immutable. Immutability has gained widespread attention with rising ransomware attacks that put enterprise data and business continuity at huge risk.

The following info-graphic displays how an immutable snapshot responds to a threat from rogue admin or ransomware as compared to a mutable snapshot.

Here are key benefits of enabling Data Lock on the profiles:

Let’s say a rogue administrator gains access to your backup environment and manually deletes the data. It could be a super admin from your organization or a person who has obtained a super admin’s credentials. Data Lock prevents modification, deletion, or tampering of such critical data.

Let’s say your organization's administrator or an employee receives an email from an unidentified source and accidentally clicks on the attachment present in this phishing email. Since the ransomware attacker now has access to your backup environment, they can modify or delete your snapshots. In such a scenario, Data Lock will prevent the deletion or modification of snapshots.

When your organization’s administrator accidentally deletes or reduces the intended retention period, this results in the loss of snapshots. In the process, some business-critical snapshots may be accidentally deleted. Data Lock will prevent the accidental deletion of such data.

The availability of the Data Lock feature applies, by default, only to the Enterprise and Elite editions. Cloud administrators can enable this setting.

The following table lists the different workloads that support the data lock feature.