RDX Removable Disk in the Public Sector

Easy to use backup solutions for municipalities

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The Problem:

Most municipalities consist of small offices and remote departments, like administrative services, education facilities, citizen office, building department or car registration. Beside paper forms, most of the information and data generated in these departments are held in digitized format, which results in a rapid data growth.

Securing all these data is essential. Because of the distributed infrastructure, it is often difficult to gather all data from the different offices and consolidate them into one backup source. In addition, network bandwidth could be an issue to be able to transfer backup data in an adequate timeframe. Modernizing existing network infrastructures could be very cost-intensive, so alternative data security strategies must be found.

The Solution:

To satisfy the different requirements of each department and office, dedicated elements of the RDX family of removable disk systems are implemented. Smaller offices and remote locations are equipped with the RDX QuikStor drive. This device easily connects via USB 3.0 or SATA III (internal version) into servers, desktops or laptops. Here, local backups are performed for each remote location. For the main or the central office, RDX QuikStation is implemented. With its iSCSI connectivity, it easily integrates into existing network infrastructures and both physical and virtual environments.

At remote departments and small offices, RDX media is rotated between the remote location and the central office, where the backup data is incorporated into the central backup set. The rugged design of the RDX media provides shock and drop resistance and is ideal for secure data transportation by mail or

courier services. Where network bandwidth is not an issue at remote sites, a two-tiered backup approach is implemented. In this case, a primary backup job saves the data to the local RDX QuikStor drive. Hereafter, a replication job transfers the backup data to the centrally installed RDX QuikStation over the network. So, two copies exist on two sites for maximum protection.

 

Security Considerations

Ransomware has emerged as the most dangerous cyber threat for all organizations. A distributed environment is one good solution to protect against these attacks, as not all systems will be harmed at a time. In case of an incident, several departments are still able to work. If a remote department or remote office has been infected, the local backup helps to recover from such an attack in a short timeframe. But as malware is also affecting backups, media rotation or the 3-2-1 backup strategy needs to be implemented, because at least one media copy was off-site during the malware attack and can be used for total system restore without the need of paying ransom.

In environments, where off-site vaulting of backups is not always possible, e.g. because of lack of personal or multiple backup runs per day, RDX RansomBlock is introduced, to protect data stored on RDX as it allows only authorized applications, like backup software, to perform modifications to the data, while defending data access from cyber-attacks.

Products Used in the Solution:

RDX QuikStor – reliable, removable and secure

  • Several RDX® QuikStor™

  • 1 RDX® QuikStation™  

  • Numerous RDX media