Nakivo adds ransomware scanning and new restore options

Backup product maker Nakivo has announced new features in the version 10.9 release of its Backup & Replication software.

The latest version adds ransomware malware scanning – which adds to existing capabilities for immutable copies – to its list of functionality. New also are bare metal recovery and recovery from tape directly to virtual machine (VM).

Nakivo was founded in 2012 and started out by specialising in VM backup. Its version 1.0 offered VMware support and installation on Windows.

It now supports workloads in VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix, Windows and Linux, and in the cloud in Amazon EC2 and Microsoft 365.

It supports use cases that range from small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), to large enterprises and managed service providers, with deployment possible on NAS, Windows and Linux, as well as in a virtual appliance or from an Amazon instance in the cloud. It can restore with granularity that ranges from single files to entire sites.

The malware scanning functionality allows Nakivo users to analyse existing backup datasets for the presence of ransomware. This works in concert with threat databases from a number of security specialists, including Windows Defender, Kaspersky, Sophos and Clam.

Infected backups can be restored to an isolated environment for forensic analysis.

Malware detection is built on top of existing abilities to make backup copies immutable so that attackers cannot compromise them. One possibility here is the ability to write Nakivo backups to Amazon S3 using object locks. The same functionality also works if using Wasabi as a cloud target. Another is that local backups via Nakivo on Linux can also be made immutable.

Bare metal restore is a new feature in this version, which vice-president for product marketing Segei Serdyuk said was a result of customer demand, adding: “There’s big demand for it in the industry because a lot of customers still run bare metal.”

“A lot of people say tape is dead. But it’s still going strong and people like it because it introduces a physical air gap which is useful as protection from ransomware and is also cheap for long-term storage”