Disaster Recovery for Your VMware Environments: Pure Protect
Hey everyone, I wanted to share some exciting news about updates to Pure Protect. We know how critical it is to protect your VMware environments, and our product is designed to make disaster recovery simpler and more efficient for you. We have added support for VMware as a recovery target, new interface, along with many other updates. If you are not familiar with Pure Protect, here are a few things that it offers to protect your applications in the event of a disaster. What Pure Protect Offers You: Flexible Recovery: You can choose to recover to AWS or a secondary VMware site. Application-Aware Protection: It protects common Microsoft applications like SQL, Active Directory, and Exchange. If you have VMware Tools installed, it takes application-consistent snapshots; otherwise, it takes a crash-consistent snapshot. Broad Compatibility: You don't need to be an existing Pure Storage customer or have FlashArray, Cloud Block Store, or FlashBlade. Pure Protect supports both Pure and non-Pure environments. Pure1 Integration: The service is managed through Pure1. If you're not already a Pure1 user, we'll get you set up. Your Data, Your Control (Cloud): You use your own AWS account for the service, and AWS will bill you directly for your usage. This approach ensures you maintain full ownership and control over your data, addressing concerns about data custody, residency, and sovereignty. For VMware, you already have control of that environment, so no concerns about control there. Automated AWS Setup: Pure Protect automates the entire AWS target site installation process with a single click, setting up things like VPCs, subnets, firewall rules, and S3 buckets. Multi-Site Protection: If you have multiple VMware vCenter sites, Pure Protect can protect them all to a single AWS account, secondary VMware location. Manual Failover: Failovers are initiated by you, on-demand. There's no automatic failover feature. This means you are in total control of your environment, run tests on-demand to ensure everything runs as expected. This gives you the peace of mind that when a disaster happens, you can fail over with confidence. Things to Keep in Mind: Pure Protect is a disaster recovery service, is not a backup software. It focuses on getting your application infrastructure back up and running, rather than performing log backups. We use orchestration for network mapping, resizing as needed, and scripting will be available soon. Licensing is based on the front-end application capacity of your protected VMs, measured in TiBs as reported by VMware. How to Learn More: Demos or PoCs: If you're interested in seeing Pure Protect in action or trying it out, please reach out, or check out the page on www.purestorage.com/draas. Have Questions? We're here to answer your questions. We're really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on Pure Protect and how it can benefit your operations. -LanceRansomware’s Worst Nightmare: New Cyber Resilience Arsenal (new blog post)
With the barrage of new announcements coming out of NYC Accelerate, I wrote a new blog post that is relevant to all customers, but specific to State / Local Government and Education customers summarizing what is new and the value it brings in terms of Active Cyber Resilience. Your feedback is welcome: https://goo.gle/3xzWj8P zPure Protect v2.6 Released - With FlashArray Integration!
Pure has released v2.6 of Pure Protect //DRaaS, with FlashArray Integration! This release brings the ability for Pure Protect to directly manage a FlashArray backing datastores in VMware. Add your FlashArray's management IP and API key to Pure Protect, and you can start creating Policies that bring the RPO down to 15 minutes! No more needing to create array policies, replication groups or POD's, or other components. Pure Protect manages all of this for you, based upon an SLA Policy applied to an Application Group of Virtual Machines! RTO's are equally as fast, with Pure Protect orchestrating the replication, volume promotion, datastore creation, virtual machine registration, power on, and some reconfiguration if needed. With all of this being done on-array and via API's, RTO speeds and reduction of Work Recovery Times (WRT) will be unmatched! Reach out to your Pure team for details, or request a Community Edition via the Pure1 Catalog to try it out!Pure Protect - What Do I Need For Initial Setup With FlashArray?
Gathering the details needed for installation, and reviewing the steps before hand, are an important part of any implementation. With Pure Protect v2.6, there are a few details to review and gather to ensure your deployment goes smoothly. Review the Quick Start Guide on the Pure1 Support Portal Review and verify or modify your firewall rules to support Pure Protect communication & workflows Create a vCenter user in each vCenter you will be connecting as a Site, which should be at least 2. You may use an administrative service account, or a limited role service account as defined in our vCenter Roles/Permissions document on the Pure1 Support Portal Verify that vSphere/vCenter is at v 7.0 or higher Verify that any FlashArrays that will be managed are at 6.6.3 or higher. Releases below 6.6.3 are not supported. Use the Pure1 NDU service for a quick, easy, and painless upgrade! Connect the FlashArrays that will be used in source/target pairs. Best Practice details for configuring FlashArray replication should be reviewed, and reach out to your Systems Engineer or Principal Technologist if you have any questions. Complete the Pure Protect Pre-Install Checklist - reach out to your Cyber Resilience FSA and/or Systems Engineer for a copy with the full details. Details of the Pre-Install checklist needed for initial Site setup are here. Additional may be needed for configuration of Policies, Groups, and Plans. For Each FlashArray: Management IP Address & API Token. If you create an API token with an expiration, you will need to remember to rotate the token in the Pure Protect Site Configuration before it expires. For Each vCenter: Site Name DRaaS VM Management IP Address & DRaaS VM name Subnet Mask & Default Gateway Domain name DNS Server Quota (if also using non-FlashArray replication) We look forward to hearing how you are using Pure Protect!
Ransomware attacks are NOT going away
Here is why ransomware attacks are persistent and unlikely to disappear: 1. High Profitability and Low Risk for Criminals Ransomware is fundamentally a business model for organized crime, and it is overwhelmingly successful and profitable. Low Barrier to Entry: The rise of Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) means even novice criminals can purchase sophisticated malware and infrastructure. This franchise model ensures high attack volume regardless of law enforcement efforts. Guaranteed Revenue Stream: The evolution to multi-extortion (encrypting data and stealing it) ensures that victims are forced to pay—either to regain system access or to prevent catastrophic data leaks and regulatory fines. This dual leverage guarantees profit even if the victim has backups. Anonymity: The use of cryptocurrency for payments, coupled with geopolitical safe zones for many RaaS groups, keeps the risk of prosecution extremely low for the attackers. 2. Attackers Are Outpacing Traditional Defenses The tactics used by ransomware groups are specifically designed to neutralize traditional defense and recovery measures: Targeting the Supply Chain: Attackers are finding success by targeting trusted vendors and IT providers to compromise dozens of companies simultaneously, making defense exponentially harder for individual organizations. Attacking Backups: Modern ransomware campaigns specifically target accessible backups to delete them or malware-infect them, eliminating the victim’s recovery option and forcing them to pay the ransom. AI for Stealth and Speed: The adoption of AI is accelerating reconnaissance and stealth, dramatically compressing the time between network access and payload deployment. Attackers can move faster than human defenders can react. 3. Cyber Resilience is the New Standard The industry has shifted its mindset from trying to achieve absolute prevention (which is impossible) to guaranteeing resilience. This shift acknowledges the persistence of ransomware. The focus is now on ensuring organizations can: Anticipate and detect threats early (low MTTD). Withstand the attack without immediate operational collapse. Recover guaranteed clean data within minutes (low MTTR). Ransomware will not disappear until the criminal model becomes unprofitable, and current data shows that attackers are highly successful and rapidly adapting their strategies.
