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Crypto-ransomware not a threat with Workspace Backup

Marquis Broadcast’s disaster recovery tool protects against catastrophic data loss

With the rise in malicious crypto-locking ransomware attacks in recent years, companies need to make certain they run scheduled backups of their data, in order to keep both media project data and critical business operations safe. However, when infected by crypto-locking ransomware, the backups themselves can also become infected, which often renders the whole backup strategy useless. Luckily, Marquis Broadcast’s Workspace Backup system avoids this problem. It analyses and copies Avid workspaces and projects to tier 2 storage and the cloud and will never backup any media that has become encrypted, ensuring valuable media files remain intact.

Crypto-locking ransomware is a harmful program that encrypts files on a computer or mobile device in order to extort money. It works by encrypting the contents of a file so that it’s impossible to read, then threatens users via prominently-displayed messages for money in exchange for the decryption key needed to restore the files. Recently, crypto-locking ransomware has taken down large broadcasters and production companies in the US and Europe, with the loss of months and months of Avid projects and associated media. Workspace Backup from Marquis Broadcast would have prevented this disaster, since the system won’t just blindly backup media files but will instead look for changes and not allow the newly encrypted media files to be added into the backup.

Workspace Backup is a powerful disaster recovery and business continuity tool, designed specifically to protect Avid shared storage systems. It uses detailed analytics of Avid workspaces to ensure the highest levels of integrity of a backup, ensuring the most crucial projects can be immediately and individually recovered to production in any location that can see the backup. Using advanced Avid NEXIS analytics Workspace Backup also provide the fastest recovery to production vs any conventional data backup product.

Workspace Backup first runs low-level analytics to examine and characterise every byte of data held within the source Avid workspaces, so it’s able to check the data structure and report if something is wrong before it’s too late. It then backs up the content of the workspaces, before copying all the projects that use media in those workspaces. Finally, those projects are analysed and any other assets that are linked to them are also backed up. Thereafter, any subsequent backups replicate changes in the source workspaces and capture new versions of the projects. Workspace Backup is ideal for use to take daily backups of Avid work-in-progress, safeguarding companies from data loss from crypto-ransomware, drive failure or if files are deleted by mistake. Workspace Backup is also Avid-certified, operating seamlessly within the Avid environment and ensuring the integrity of the media backup.

Please read our whitepaper to see how to best protect and enable the industries fastest Avid NEXIS recovery to production.

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