Enhancing Enterprise Security with the Essential Eight and StorageGuard  

The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) has developed the Essential Eight, a set of baseline mitigation strategies designed to protect organizations against a wide range of cyber threats. Implementing these strategies can significantly enhance your security posture.  

Enterprise Storage and Backup platforms are critical components of an organization’s IT infrastructure, storing vast amounts of sensitive and essential data. Ensuring these platforms are secure is paramount.  

StorageGuard, a powerful security auditing tool, can play a pivotal role in helping you meet the Essential Eight requirements and ensure your storage and backup systems are robust and secure. 

Patching Applications and Operating Systems 

One crucial aspect of the Essential Eight is patching applications and operating systems. Timely patching is vital to protect against known vulnerabilities that cybercriminals can exploit.  

StorageGuard can automate the auditing process to check if the latest patches and updates are applied to storage and backup platforms, and whether currently installed Storage OS, Backup appliances, or Storage/Backup software are vulnerable.  

This ensures that all Storage and Backup systems are up-to-date with the latest security patches, significantly reducing the risk of exploitation from unpatched vulnerabilities. 

Application Control 

Another key component of the Essential Eight is application control, which prevents the execution of unapproved or malicious software.  

StorageGuard helps you achieve this by generating an inventory of Storage and Backup applications and regularly auditing the configuration of storage and backup systems – ensuring that only authorized Storage and Backup applications and versions are allowed. 

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) 

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is also a critical element of the Essential Eight, providing an additional layer of security to verify user identities.  

StorageGuard can audit and verify that MFA is implemented and enforced across all your storage and backup systems. By ensuring MFA is consistently applied, StorageGuard helps you protect sensitive data from unauthorized access – even if user credentials are compromised. 

Securing Backups 

Backing up important data is another essential strategy, as it provides a safety net in the event of data loss or corruption. However, the backups themselves must be secure.  

StorageGuard verifies that backup platforms are hardened, and that backups are protected against tampering and unauthorized access.  

By auditing the security of your backup systems, StorageGuard guarantees that you can reliably restore your data when needed – without the risk of backup data being compromised. 

Restricting Administrative Privileges 

Lastly, restricting administrative privileges is a vital part of the Essential Eight, as these privileges can be a primary target for attackers.  

StorageGuard can help you by auditing and enforcing strict controls over administrative access for mission-critical storage and backup platforms.  

By ensuring that only authorized personnel have the necessary privileges and that these privileges are regularly reviewed and adjusted as needed, StorageGuard helps minimize the risk of privilege misuse and potential insider threats. 

Comprehensive Vulnerability Scanning and Configuration Compliance with StorageGuard 

Enterprise Storage and Backup platforms are essential for storing and safeguarding an organization’s critical data, making their security paramount.  

StorageGuard is a comprehensive tool that helps you in implementing and maintaining the Essential Eight mitigation strategies for Enterprise Storage and Backup infrastructure. It does this by: 

• Regularly auditing storage and backup configurations 

• Ensuring the application of security patches 

• Verifying multi-factor authentication 

• Securing backups 

• Controlling administrative privileges 

Utilizing StorageGuard not only helps you meet regulatory requirements, but also provides peace of mind that essential data is protected against a wide array of cyber threats. 

Implementing these strategies and leveraging tools like StorageGuard ensures that storage and backup systems remain secure, reliable, and resilient against evolving cyber threats. 

Take the 2-minute Ransomware Resiliency Assessment for Storage & Backups, to receive your maturity score and practical recommendations.