Opti9 Technologies, LLC. (Opti9) announced its selection by Wasabi Technologies (Wasabi) as a Technical Alliance Partner (TAP) to offer integrated disaster recovery and artificial intelligence (AI) powered ransomware detection services. As result of this trusted partnership, Wasabi clients can now natively integrate a comprehensive disaster recovery and security monitoring that includes proactive protection of their data from ransomware attacks. 

Opti9 has been a leading managed hybrid cloud solutions and security services provider for over two decades. As part of their growing list of innovative contributions to provide secure and reliable cloud environments, Opti9 has developed a disaster recovery solution for Wasabi clients called DR-Lite which allows Wasabi customers to recover workloads already backed up to Wasabi onto the Opti9 DR infrastructure without the need to make any changes. This cost-effective and Wasabi approved solution provides rapid recovery to any of Opti9's global cloud regions located adjacent to Wasabi cloud storage, ensuring low-latency and faster restoration.

Additionally, Opti9 has also integrated Wasabi directly into its Observr platform. Observr integrates with a customer's Veeam backup and replication servers and uses AI to detect suspicious activity which may indicate the presence of a malicious attacker or insider threat. This includes suspicious changes to retention settings, job definitions, encryption, immutability, data deletion, job modifications or deletion, and many other factors. In addition to automated notification and API integration with third-party security tools, Observr can also automatically air-gap offsite backup storage so that an attacker who has gained access to Veeam can no longer impose changes on it, read/restore backups, or delete it. In the next version of Observr, Opti9 and Wasabi will enhance Observr to support its air-gap capability natively within Wasabi. This will allow Observr to automatically air-gap a client's Wasabi environment whenever potential threats are detected, further strengthening data security measures.

Observr's air-gap capability now natively integrates with Wasabi and Observr can automatically air-gap Wasabi buckets from Veeam in response to detected threats.

"Backup and replication infrastructure has recently become a focus for attackers who know that eliminating an organization's ability to recover from a ransomware attack increases their likelihood of being paid the ransom. Additionally, attackers are typically present within an environment for 60 days or more before initiating an attack, allowing them to delete and circumvent protection provided by immutability alone," explained Sagi Brody, CTO of Opti9. "The Observr + Wasabi solution provides Veeam customers with maximum assurances to protect their recovery capabilities by combining Wasabi's secure, immutable, and encrypted cloud storage with contextual threat detection and an isolated recovery environment. By continuously monitoring Veeam to ensure backup jobs, retention, encryption, and immutability settings have not been disabled or altered, it ensures customers can recover their data when needed. Additionally, Opti9's DR-Lite provides an isolated compute environment, pre-configured and pre-connected to customer's Wasabi storage buckets and ready to initiate a failover immediately if and when needed."

Opti9's Observr, as well as DR-Lite are available to any customers utilizing Veeam + Wasabi and can easily be enabled without making any changes at all to their Veeam or Wasabi environments. These solutions require no software agents, special VPN or network configurations and provide RTOs for threat detection and response times.

"Wasabi is the best cloud storage solution for backup and recovery with lightning-fast data backups and restores with immutable hot cloud storage that delivers users predictable pricing and performance," said Clark Brown, Vice President of North America Channels at Wasabi. "Opti9's disaster recovery solution and Observr ransomware detection service are two critical cloud security requirements we're thrilled to offer Wasabi clients who need to ensure they are protected from malicious actors."