Zero Trust Doesn’t Stop Hackers. Zero Access® Does.

Part of the Cobalt Iron blog series

Sophos’s research on ransomware recovery outcomes found that organizations whose backups were compromised during an attack faced median overall recovery costs of $3 million, eight times the $375,000 reported by organizations whose backups were not impacted. The disparity underscores a critical security reality: Backups cannot serve as an effective recovery mechanism unless the backup infrastructure itself is protected from attack.

That’s one reason so many organizations have adopted a zero trust security model for accessing and managing IT resources such as applications, devices, or data. With this approach, a user attempting to access a resource is never trusted by default, even if they are already part of the corporate network. Access is granted only after successful validation using two or more methods of verification, also known as multi-factor authentication.

Many IT solutions, including most backup and disaster recovery products, trumpet zero trust — codified in NIST Special Publication 800-207 — as the pinnacle of security. Zero trust architecture requires organizations to validate that users and their devices have the right privileges and attributes to access given resources.

While zero trust authentication does provide some level of security hardening, the approach still implies there is access to the allowed resources. When someone has access, no matter how legitimate, there’s potential for error (or worse).

In fact, a zero trust approach might instill a false sense of confidence in an organization’s security posture, leading to less scrutiny of those that do pass authentication processing. This means that if an account or credentials are compromised, significant damage might be done before the breach is discovered.

The best way to completely protect your IT resources, including data, is by not allowing any user or entity to get to them in the first place: Zero Access®.

A Zero Access approach takes security protection to a higher level than zero trust. With Zero Access, users have no access at all to the IT resources. But how are the IT resources used if there is no access? Let’s take backup environments as an example.

A typical backup application requires:

• the backup software,
• a backup server to run on,
• an operating system on that server,
• a backup catalog database,
• a backup network,
• storage devices,
• reporting tools, monitoring tools, and maybe even some security tools.

Each of these hardware and software components includes access for administering them. A backup product may offer multi-factor authentication to access its software, but that still allows access to the backup software itself as well as all the other components it needs to run. And that is just for a single backup server deployment. Many large environments require dozens, or maybe hundreds, of backup servers to protect their corporate data — a lot of exposure, even with a touted zero trust approach by the backup software.

Cobalt Iron® Compass® provides a much more secure, and simpler, approach to enterprise backup using a unique Zero Access architecture.

How is this possible and how is Compass different than zero trust backup solutions?

In most IT environments, administrators install an operating system and backup software on a standard server. They have logins for the operating system, logins for the backup software, logins for the database, logins for any reporting or security tools, and logins to the storage devices where all the backup information is stored. Humans must log in to all these components, probably using Active Directory logins or admin logins that are used for other tasks — credentials that are also part of production systems. If ransomware were to compromise or destroy any of these credentials, it would gain the same access to the entire backup environment as well. That's real exposure, even with zero trust in place.

The Cobalt Iron Compass vaulted backup solution is different. Compass software automatically manages and monitors all the hardware and software components of the backup environment, and no human ever needs to — or is allowed to — access any of them directly. Compass analytics and automation software do the work that is typically done manually.

The Essentials of Compass 

It starts with the Compass Vault, which contains the Compass backup technologies and is preconfigured as the backup target. The Vault is delivered in a SaaS model that is simpler, and more secure, than even hyper-converged models: it requires no ongoing management and allows no access after deployment. Compass tracks every aspect of backup operations, infrastructure, software updates, and service levels, so the backup infrastructure stays audit-ready at all times. Vaults serve as the backup infrastructure for an enterprise, replacing all other components and removing the vulnerabilities associated with them.

The Compass Analytics Engine is a software component that lives in the cloud. The Analytics Engine uses automation and analytics to ensure all backup and data management tasks are carried out on all Vaults according to customer-defined policies. Vaults communicate with the Analytics Engine via hyper-secure connections.

Users experience Compass by logging in to the Commander interface. Commander connects to the Analytics Engine, and the Analytics Engine communicates with the Vault — that layered structure is what prevents any human access to the Vault itself. Commander allows users to establish policies, such as retention periods and schedules, and maintain visibility into all aspects of their backup operations through dashboards and reporting.

Commander is accessed via zero trust, multi-factor authentication, but even super-user privileges inside Commander give Zero Access into the Vault backup infrastructure beneath it. That same separation extends to immutability: retention windows enforced on the Vault carry no credential path a Commander administrator, however privileged, can use to override them — the difference between immutability configured as a setting and immutability that’s architecturally enforced.

For IBM i environments specifically, Compass Tape Gateway extends this architecture to the tape workflows that BRMS, SAV, and SAVSYS operations depend on. IBM i systems connect to the gateway over iSCSI as a VTL target, and BRMS control groups, job schedules, and rotation logic run against it without disruption. There is no OS-level or component-level login to the vault, no exposed software interface, and no credential management surface for an administrator, or an attacker, to reach. The tape operations stay familiar; what no longer exists are the access points to the tape infrastructure they used to depend on.

Zero trust won’t stop every attacker, and a compromised credential that passes verification can move freely until someone notices. That’s why Zero Access should be the backup model of the future, where possible. Compass is the only backup solution out there to offer Zero Access, and it can replace any other backup products.

Contact us to find out how easy it is to implement Zero Access data protection.