The agreement represents an important milestone in Nutanix’s regional ecosystem strategy, bringing together Nutanix’s hybrid multicloud platform with Datamellon’s expertise in cloud-native architecture, analytics and enterprise digital transformation.

Through this collaboration, the two companies aim to support organisations across Sub-Saharan Africa as they modernise infrastructure, accelerate cloud adoption and build cloud-native environments that support data-driven innovation and artificial intelligence.

“Africa’s technology landscape is evolving rapidly, with organisations looking for partners that can help them move faster while building resilient digital platforms, ” said Tunde Abagun, Senior Enterprise Account Manager – Team Lead for West, East and Central Africa, Nutanix. “Our collaboration with Datamellon represents an important step in expanding the Nutanix ecosystem across Sub-Saharan Africa. By working together with born-in-the-cloud partners that specialise in modern architectures and cloud-native innovation, we can help enterprises accelerate their hybrid cloud journey and unlock new opportunities through data and AI.”

Born-in-the-cloud partners play an increasingly important role in helping enterprises design and operate modern application environments. By formalising its collaboration with Datamellon, Nutanix is expanding its ability to support organisations adopting hybrid and multicloud architectures across the region.

“Partnering with Nutanix allows us to combine our expertise in cloud-native transformation with one of the most powerful hybrid multicloud platforms in the market,” said Wale Adedeji, CEO at Datamellon. “Together, we are well positioned to help organisations across Africa modernise their infrastructure, unlock advanced analytics and build the next generation of digital services.”

Datamellon works with enterprises on cloud-native development, advanced analytics and AI-driven applications, supporting organisations as they modernise infrastructure and build new digital services.

The company has expanded its presence across multiple regions, including Africa, the UK, the Middle East and North America, delivering transformation programmes for large enterprise customers.

The partnership will focus on joint customer engagements, solution development and go-to-market initiatives aimed at helping organisations simplify IT operations, improve application performance and accelerate digital transformation.

The MoU builds on growing demand across Africa for flexible cloud platforms that allow organisations to innovate while maintaining control over their data, applications and infrastructure.

Tunde Abagun, sales lead for West, East and Central Africa at Nutanix, said conversations across African boardrooms are evolving from whether businesses should modernise their IT systems to how they can do so efficiently without creating operational complexity or escalating costs.

According to him, hybrid multicloud has now emerged as the dominant operating model for enterprises across Africa, including the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, as organisations seek to balance private infrastructure, public cloud services, and emerging digital application platforms.

“Hybrid multicloud is no longer a transition phase. It has become the operating model,” Abagun said.

He noted that many organisations are grappling with growing operational fragmentation as they expand across multiple environments, leading to tool sprawl, inconsistent operations, and rising management overheads.

The situation, he explained, is particularly evident in African markets where businesses are balancing rapid digital adoption with infrastructure challenges such as inconsistent connectivity, power instability, and evolving regulatory requirements around data governance.

Abagun said the next phase of enterprise infrastructure would be driven by platform-based models capable of delivering operational consistency across environments.

According to him, enterprises are increasingly moving away from managing isolated infrastructure systems toward unified platforms that support traditional virtualised workloads, cloud-native applications, and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven services within a single operational framework.

He explained that platform thinking shifts the focus from where workloads are hosted to how they are consistently managed, regardless of whether they operate on-premises or in public cloud environments.

“Today, companies must be able to support legacy applications, cloud-native services, and AI-driven workloads simultaneously,” he stated.

The Nutanix executive added that AI adoption is accelerating the need for more adaptable infrastructure as enterprises seek systems capable of handling GPU acceleration, large-scale data processing, and predictable performance environments without deploying entirely separate technology stacks.

Rather than building isolated AI infrastructure, he said organisations are looking to integrate AI capabilities into their existing operational platforms to reduce complexity and improve scalability.

Abagun further noted that Africa’s digital economy presents a unique opportunity for businesses to build inherently hybrid and portable infrastructure models because many organisations are modernising systems while simultaneously launching new digital services.

He said this gives African enterprises the flexibility to strategically adopt cloud services while retaining control over sensitive workloads and maintaining operational resilience amid changing economic and regulatory conditions.

According to him, the future of enterprise infrastructure will be defined less by where workloads are located and more by how seamlessly organisations can operate across different environments.

“The next phase of digital transformation in Africa will not be about choosing between environments, but about building platforms that simplify operations, reduce fragmentation, and enable organisations to operate consistently across all environments,” Abagun added.

According to Gartner, 2025 will see cloud computing cement its role as the primary driver of AI enablement, multi cloud expansion and digital sovereignty strategies.

Yet many organisations remain weighed down by fragmented tools and operational silos that inflate costs and stall innovation.

The issue is no longer whether to move to the cloud, but whether your current environment is agile enough to compete.

Troye’s cloud solutions are designed to unlock new possibilities by simplifying infrastructure while expanding what businesses can achieve.

Through Private Cloud, Hybrid Multi‑Cloud, and Strategic Consultation, Troye helps organisations move beyond simply keeping the lights on toward platforms that actively enable transformation.

Private Cloud provides a secure and controlled foundation for critical workloads, delivering predictable performance and governance without sacrificing agility.

Hybrid Multi‑Cloud extends that foundation, allowing workloads to move seamlessly across environments to meet performance, cost, and compliance needs.

According to recent industry reports, 87 % of organisations now operate multi-cloud environments, while 72 % embrace hybrid cloud strategies that blend private and public clouds.

Troye’s Strategic Consultation ensures these environments are aligned with business outcomes, so technology decisions support long‑term growth rather than short‑term fixes.

Modern applications demand flexibility and consistency. Enterprises are now expected to support both traditional virtual machines and cloud‑native containerised workloads.

Nutanix addresses this challenge with a unified platform that runs applications consistently across private and public clouds.

Independent evaluations highlight Nutanix as a leader in multi-cloud container platform capabilities, emphasising unified management, hybrid deployment options, and governance – critical for modern distributed workloads.

Cloud innovation is no longer about chasing trends; it is about building an adaptable foundation that absorbs change without disruption.

Troye partners with organisations to design and implement cloud strategies that replace fragmentation with clarity, and limitation with opportunity.

By combining modern platforms like Nutanix with deep expertise in Private Cloud, Hybrid Multi‑Cloud, and strategic consultation, we enable businesses to run applications anywhere without chaos, and to grow with confidence in an increasingly demanding digital landscape.

After 25 years operating as the Amhara Credit and Savings Institute (ACSI), one of Ethiopia’s largest microfinance institutions, Tsedey Bank’s elevation to commercial banking status in 2022 marked a pivotal shift for the country’s financial sector.

Free from legacy systems, the bank had a unique opportunity to design a modern digital banking foundation capable of delivering simplicity, scale, and financial inclusion to millions of Ethiopians across both rural and urban regions.

A key advantage in this process was the involvement of Ethiopia’s Information Network and Security Agency (INSA), which provided consulting support, Request for Proposal (RFP) preparation, and compliance guidance to ensure security and regulatory standards were embedded from the outset. Working alongside local implementation partner Deliver ICT, Tsedey Bank deployed a next-generation private cloud environment integrating compute, storage, and networking in a single software-defined platform.

“Looking at global trends, we saw that infrastructure was moving to hyperconvergence and software-defined networking, and Nutanix stood out as a leader in this area,” said Tadele Alemu, Director, IT Infrastructure Management at Tsedey Bank. “Today, 100% of our core banking and enterprise systems run on Nutanix, and we’ve built a platform that’s scalable, resilient, and easy to manage.”

What began as a decentralised microfinance network has evolved into a modern, connected banking operation with 627 branches, 13,000 employees, and over 12.4 million customers nationwide.

Centralised infrastructure now allows customers to access their accounts and services from any branch, advancing Tsedey’s mission to expand financial inclusion, while the IT team manages all operations through a single pane of glass.

The bank’s infrastructure, initially comprising eight Nutanix nodes, has expanded to sixteen, spanning main and disaster recovery sites. This architecture provides the scalability, resilience, and performance necessary to support rapidly growing demand and future digital services.

“We’ve implemented the latest technologies and we’re proud of how we’re using them,” says Alemu. “When people see us as a Tier 1 bank, even though we’re technically Tier 3, it’s proof that we’re doing things right. This project was more than just deploying a technology solution; it was about building a platform for inclusion, growth, and national progress.”

Beyond the technology, the platform has empowered Tsedey Bank’s IT team. Although initially new to Nutanix, the team quickly built confidence through Nutanix’s learning resources and certification programmes. Today, the bank manages day-to-day operations internally, supported by an intuitive management interface and responsive vendor support.

“Our partnership with Tsedey Bank underscores the power of modernisation done right,” said Tunde Abagun, sales lead for West, East and Central Africa at Nutanix. “Their vision to drive inclusive, technology-enabled banking across Ethiopia exemplifies how hyperconverged infrastructure can help emerging financial institutions scale confidently and compete at the highest levels.”

New research on the Nutanix Cloud Platform reveals the brutal truth: companies that modernise are seeing a 391 percent return on investment with payback in just seven months, while those who delay continue to bleed efficiency, money and opportunity.

Legacy environments are no longer harmless or merely ‘old’. They are actively slowing down business transformation, creating operational drag, and consuming budgets that should be driving innovation. For a market as competitive and cost-pressured as South Africa, this is not a technical concern. It is a strategic liability.

The real cost of staying legacy

Traditional three tier architectures have served their time, but they now create more problems than value. They are expensive to maintain, complex to manage and painfully slow to scale.

Every additional server, storage array or licensing renewal pushes costs higher. Every upgrade window risks downtime. Every manual administrative task steals time from teams who should be focusing on delivering value.

This is precisely why the latest IDC research into Nutanix deployments is so revealing. Organisations that replace legacy infrastructure with a unified platform experience:

• 391 percent ROI over three years
• A 7-month payback period
• 42 percent lower IT operations costs

These are not minor improvements. They represent a total transformation of how IT delivers value to the business.

Why Nutanix delivers such dramatic gains

Nutanix replaces fragmented, legacy stacks with a single, software defined platform that brings compute, storage and virtualisation together.

Instead of juggling multiple systems, organisations run everything from one integrated environment. This eliminates layers of complexity and drastically reduces the overhead required to keep the lights on.

The platform is designed to scale simply and predictably. South African organisations can grow at their own pace without disruptive redesigns or capital-heavy hardware cycles.

Unified management tools allow teams to automate routine tasks, improve resilience and manage far more with far less effort. The result is a leaner, faster, more reliable IT operation.

The time to modernise is now

With years of experience helping enterprises modernise complex environments, we understand the South African context better than anyone. We have seen first-hand how quickly organisations can reduce cost, improve resilience and accelerate transformation once they move to a Nutanix powered model.

We guide customers through every step of the journey, ensuring that modernisation is not disruptive but strategic. The goal is simple: deliver an infrastructure platform that finally aligns with business goals instead of holding them back.

The evidence is overwhelming. Modern infrastructure is no longer a luxury. It is a business requirement. Every month spent maintaining legacy systems is a month of wasted budget and lost potential.

Nutanix proves that modernisation pays for itself faster than most organisations imagine. Troye ensures that the transition is smooth, stable and strategically aligned.

If enterprises want to stay competitive, reduce cost and unlock new levels of performance, the first step is clear: retire legacy infrastructure and move to a unified modern platform that delivers measurable results.

 The availability of cloud credits for third-party purchases through the hyperscalers’ marketplaces and the emergence of new digital-first buyers are reshaping enterprise customer procurement behavior, vendor sales strategies and channel models.

While most vendor sales via these marketplaces are today “direct” to end customers, channel partners are playing an increasingly important role. By 2027, Canalys expects more than 50% of marketplace sales to flow through the channel.

This trend is explored in a new Canalys research report: Now and next for hyperscaler marketplaces.

Enterprise customers have committed to spend over US$360 billion on the top three hyperscalers’ cloud services on a multi-year basis.

Spend is shifting to the hyperscalers’ marketplaces as customers seek to burn down a portion of their cloud credits on third-party software and SaaS.

AWS Marketplace remains the clear leader in terms of sales volume, but Microsoft and Google Cloud are focused on closing the gap.

With enterprises facing IT budget pressure, the opportunity to use pre-approved cloud budgets to source a wide array of software and cybersecurity products while taking advantage of simplified billing and consolidated purchasing can be highly compelling.

This is tempting vendors from across the technology spectrum to sell through the hyperscalers’ marketplaces. CrowdStrike and Snowflake were among the first to publicly claim US$1 billion of total cumulative sales through marketplaces, and a host of the largest software and cybersecurity vendors are actively embracing this route to market.

Cisco, Citrix, IBM, NetApp, Nutanix, Red Hat, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Zoom are just some of the vendors that have launched or grown their sales on the hyperscalers’ marketplaces so far in 2024.

At the same time, many smaller “digital native” ISVs built on one of the three top hyperscalers’ cloud platforms are using their respective marketplaces as their primary routes to market.

The hyperscalers meanwhile are funneling substantial investments into marketplace co-sell resources, demand generation, sales incentives and channel programs (along with cuts to marketplace fees) to attract vendors to their cloud platforms.

The channel is becoming a focal point in the battle between the hyperscalers as vendors prioritize partner-first marketplace strategies.

Through models such as AWS’ Channel Partner Private Offers, Microsoft’s Multiparty Private Offers and Google Cloud’s newly launched Marketplace Channel Private Offers, vendors can enable their partners to create customized offers for their customers on the hyperscalers’ marketplaces while seeking to maintain margins for the channel.

“The channel has concerns about the rise of marketplaces, but both hyperscalers and vendors acknowledge the vital role of channel partners in driving customer adoption and growth,” said Alastair Edwards, chief analyst at Canalys. “Customers often prefer buying through trusted partners for help with managing cloud commitments and accessing professional services and technical expertise when sourcing complex technologies from multiple marketplaces.”

IT distributors are facing increasing competition from hyperscaler marketplaces that are themselves acting as digital distribution platforms.

Yet distributors will be important to reduce operational challenges for partners and vendors as adoption grows globally and to support the growing number of second-tier partners whose customers want to buy this way.

Canalys expects the development and expansion of new programs, such as AWS DSOR, to support greater distributor involvement.

Channel partners are vital to ensure customers can access the technologies they need, regardless of their buying preferences.

“A seamless buying experience is essential, and success will depend on greater API-led integration between hyperscalers, distributors and partner platforms,” said Edwards.

[Featured Image Credit]

Reshma will report directly to Paulo Pereira, VP, Systems Engineering, EMEA and will oversee the expanding team of systems engineers in emerging markets.

The Systems Engineering team is dedicated to delivering pre-sales consulting, offering technical guidance, and providing support to customers and channel partners.

Collaborating closely with the sales teams, these systems engineers offer recommendations and design optimal solutions for customers, leveraging Nutanix’s extensive portfolio.

Speaking about her appointment, Paulo Pereira, VP Systems Engineering for EMEA at Nutanix, comments:

“Reshma’s dedication to technology, customer advocacy, and the creation of effective, empowered teams that find joy in their hard work and bring value is truly commendable. As Nutanix looks to make further strides in Emerging Markets, Reshma’s extensive experience in technical management positions, coupled with her keen business acumen will prove highly advantageous to the company in capitalizing on various market opportunities, introducing innovation and enhancing customer satisfaction.”

With an extensive IT career spanning over 20 years, Reshma has held various positions in engineering, solution selling, and management at NetScaler, Citrix Systems, and her last role at VMware as Director, Solution Engineering.

“What impresses me most about Nutanix is the company’s leadership in the cloud computing domain through its continuous commitment to innovation – transforming complexity into simplicity. The rapid growth of Nutanix in recent years is remarkable, and I am fully prepared to embrace the challenges that come with my new role. Surrounded by a highly skilled team and an unparalleled technology portfolio, I eagerly anticipate contributing to the advancement of Nutanix’s leadership in hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure,” says Reshma.

By leveraging Nutanix’s solutions, CSCS has transformed its extensive operational infrastructure, realising significant financial savings and solidifying its position as a technological frontrunner in the capital markets.

The Central Securities Clearing System PLC (CSCS) stands tall as Nigeria’s premier financial markets infrastructure (FMI).

As Nigeria’s Central Securities Depository (CSD), CSCS is entrusted with depositing, clearing, and settling a staggering 99.3% of all trades in the capital markets.

As CSCS continues to push the boundaries of technological innovation in the financial sector, this collaboration with Nutanix exemplifies the transformative potential of forward-thinking technology choices that are helping it develop and deploy innovative solutions for its clients.

“We view ourselves not just as a financial entity but fundamentally as a technology company within the capital market,” says Tobe Nnadozie, Divisional Head of Business Technology & Digital Innovation at CSCS.

CSCS’s journey towards modernising its infrastructure began in 2018. By 2019, they were set on a mission: to find a partner capable of pioneering self-service platforms, supporting cutting-edge technologies like AI and blockchain, and, most importantly, ensuring robust business continuity and disaster recovery.

“After a thorough analysis, Nutanix stood out as the undisputed leader,” reveals Nnadozie. Yet, the road ahead was daunting. With over 70 physical servers to consolidate and immense data security needs, the task was Herculean. Nutanix was pivotal, helping us reduce our infrastructure to around 50 servers. They’ve been central in hosting our most crucial components, ensuring that 90% of our systems are now smoothly running on their clusters,” states Nnadozie.

The collaboration also ensured unparalleled flexibility, with the capability to seamlessly switch between on-premises and cloud operations.

According to Nnadozie, Nutanix has provided CSCS with a robust support system it can tap into at any time, and the value of Nutanix Flow and the premium support services accessed through its Nutanix Ultimate License has been exceptionally valuable to the team.

“Integrating Nutanix resulted in immediate financial clarity, with savings of approximately $450,000,” Nnadozie remarks.

“The benefits extended to budget transparency, rapid scalability, and more. We also saw a benefit to our workforce. Our team can now manage this state-of-the-art environment through extensive training without expanding our personnel, and they can do this from anywhere,” adds Nnadozie.

The project to upgrade its technology was more than just a project for CSCS, which strives to stay ahead of the financial services innovation curve and provide its customers with world-class services.

The team believes that its agility, backed by its technology decisions, has revolutionised how it operates in the capital markets.

“Our CEO often refers to our operations, powered by Nutanix, as the engine room of Nigeria’s broader capital market,” he adds.

Looking ahead, the team says it plans to expand its infrastructure with Nutanix and is setting its sights on a prolonged partnership stretching over the next five to seven years.

This will include examining how the two can further collaborate to enhance their hybrid multicloud capabilities.

“From the outset, we recognised the innovative and forward-thinking ethos of the CSCS team,” says Tunde Abagun, Sales Lead at Nutanix West, East, and Central Africa. “Their proactive approach to revolutionising Nigeria’s financial infrastructure has truly set them apart in the capital market space. At Nutanix, we pride ourselves on facilitating such transformational journeys and seeing CSCS leverage our technology with such proficiency and impact has been nothing short of astounding. We’re both proud and humbled to play a role in their ongoing success story.”

Nutanix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, has announced the financial services industry findings of its fifth annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey, which measures enterprise progress with cloud adoption.

The research reveals that mixed deployments among financial companies are at 64%, which is slightly ahead of the global average, and data security considerations drive many of the financial sector’s infrastructure investment and application mobility decisions.

This remarkable adoption rate in financial services reflects the highly competitive industry’s commitment to significantly enhance the customer experience, leveraging hybrid multicloud deployments to fuel digitalisation, advanced data capabilities, and modernise applications.

“Increased infrastructure diversity and a heightened emphasis on data storage, management, security, and cloud-native services are driving all IT professionals to seek hybrid operations that transcend private and public infrastructure. As evidenced by recent regulatory measures such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), operational resilience and concentration risk are additional driving factors to hybrid model adoption,”

said Ian Haynes, EMEA Field CTO, Nutanix.

“For cloud deployment models, the financial services industry has emerged as a frontrunner, surpassing many other sectors in embracing the hybrid multicloud approach.”

Key findings from this year’s report include:

• Hybrid multicloud adoption has accelerated and is expected to rise in financial services. The financial services industry has made significant progress in adopting cloud technology over the past year, with 64% of those surveyed using multiple IT environments – whether a mix of private and public clouds, multiple public clouds, or on-premises and hosted private infrastructure.
• Cybersecurity is the biggest IT infrastructure driver. The financial sector and global respondents prioritised cybersecurity above all else. This is not surprising, given the increasing sophistication of cyberattacks and the critical role that IT plays in financial services organisations.
• Mixed environments create new challenges and demand for a single place to manage all workloads and data. Most ECI respondents agree that having a single platform to manage their diverse private and public infrastructures would be ideal. Among those from financial firms, 96% agreed. However, only 42% reported actually having that visibility. The visibility findings indicate a gap in capabilities, highlighting the need for integrated tools to improve hybrid IT operations. Without visibility, IT teams are unable to manage, secure, synchronise, or analyse what they cannot see.
• The overriding driver of application movement among ECI financial services firms in the past year was to improve data access speeds. All respondents in the financial sector (100%) indicated that they had moved applications between IT infrastructures in the past 12 months. Nearly half (49%) cited a desire to accelerate data access as a reason for the move. This driver was followed by aspirations to improve their companies’ security posture or better meet regulatory requirements and to gain the ability to integrate with cloud-native services, such as AI and machine learning.
• Cost factors remain a wild card. ECI respondents tend to be fickle in their attitudes toward IT cost, which seems to be inching downward on IT priority lists – falling to last on global respondents’ infrastructure criteria lists and tying for fourth in importance among financial companies. At the same time, most respondents rank controlling costs high on their list of challenges. For example, 87% of financial services respondents described cloud cost control as a challenge with managing their current IT infrastructures, and about a third said it was a significant one.

For the fifth consecutive year, Vanson Bourne conducted research on behalf of Nutanix, surveying 1,450 IT decision-makers around the world in December 2022 and January 2023.

This report is supplemental to the global 5th Annual Enterprise Cloud Index master report and focuses specifically on cloud deployments within the financial services industry.

It sheds light on the cloud plans, priorities, challenges, and experiences of IT professionals operating in this sector, offering valuable insights for comparison with global responses and other industries.

Gain a deeper understanding of the cloud deployment journey of financial services organisations and uncover key trends and benchmarks in this ever-evolving landscape.

Ransomware is projected to cost its victims around $265 billion annually by 2031. Businesses will face a new attack every two seconds as perpetrators progressively refine their malware payloads and related extortion activities. The data clearly suggests that it is not a question of if but when a business is attacked by ransomware.

Shared storage has been an affluent target for cybercriminals to hijack valuable customer, financial or sensitive information and extort payment in return for access to the data. Improving business defences is a top priority for local organisations actively seeking storage security strategies against malicious cyber-attacks.

Some estimates say that a ransomware attack occurs every 11 seconds. These attacks can cripple any company, causing unexpected downtime and wreaking havoc on an enterprise’s operations, production, customer service, and future reputation.

Integrated approach

Recovering from a ransomware attack can cost a lot of time, effort, and money. Simply having a backup of company data is no longer sufficient, as attackers can infiltrate those as well. Furthermore, ransomware attacks cannot be detected by antivirus software or firewalls.

Hardly surprising that successful attacks can cause tremendous losses, including lost productivity costs, forensic investigation costs, data restoration costs from backup, and the costs of hiring emergency consultants and crisis managers. And that is not even the reputational and financial damage that comes from having to pay legislative fines.

Businesses need a cyber-security and ransomware protection plan integrated with the storage system to detect, prevent, recover, and analyse cyber-attacks. This will ensure that structured and unstructured data is protected, no matter where the data resides.

But in addition to practising such a defence-in-depth strategy, many local IT professionals are beginning to see the need for immutable backups.

They provide a much-needed last line of defence from ransomware and other attacks. Furthermore, it is an intelligent way to maintain a successful strategy for business continuity and disaster recovery.

Defining immutability 

Immutable can be defined as something that is not capable of or susceptible to change. An immutable backup is a copy of business data that, once saved, cannot be modified, overwritten, encrypted, deleted, or altered in any way, even by the applications, users, administrators, or the systems that generated the data.

Immutability helps defend against many typical causes of data corruption or deletion, from malicious viruses and ransomware to administrative errors to intentional sabotage and software bugs. Traditional mutable backups can be subject to encryption or other tampering after the fact presenting a severe vulnerability in any enterprise’s IT ecosystem.

While every business, regardless of size or industry sector, can benefit from immutable backups, these are especially critical for companies that must comply with strict data protection mandates, such as healthcare or financial organisations. Law enforcement agencies also often use immutable backups to protect evidential video and audio data.

Getting immutability right

Many immutable backups copy data bits to the cloud when users create them. When the data is in the cloud, users can flag the system to lock the data down for a set amount of time or indefinitely. Once locked down, the data can be read many times but not written again, even by system administrators.

The cloud is the most common medium for immutable backups because it is typically air-gapped from a company’s primary storage medium, often an on-site data centre. The cloud is also preferred because it can be accessed virtually anywhere, making a recovery quick and painless. Compare that with the challenges of recovery from physical tape media that could take days to be retrieved from an archive across the country.

A system for immutable backups will keep a predefined number of setpoints, essentially an archive of immutable backups. This means the business will always have the most recent clean copy of its data in case of an attack or other unplanned events.

Beyond traditional approaches

While conventional protection measures such as file permissions or access control lists are an essential part of any data security strategy, they can be sidestepped by advanced threat actors.

Immutable backups help keep companies immune to ransomware and many other attacks. While attackers may try to hold an organisation’s data hostage, the effect is nullified when the business can simply recover its data via an immutable backup without paying the ransom.