The Datto SIRIS 3 platform has added a ransomware detection algorithm to take advance of a backup provider’s capability to easily restore a system to its pre-infection status.

Cloud data production vendor Datto made a series of product update announcements last week at their DattoCon EMEA partner conference. Key announcements were made to the Datto SIRIS 3 total data protection platform, to the Datto NAS 3 cloud protected network storage solution, and to the Datto Backupify cloud to cloud protection solution. A common theme running through much of this is enhanced protection against ransomware.

Datto is highlighting that SIRIS 3 now includes the industry’s first ransomware detection capability. Matt Richards, Product Marketing Manager at Datto, also emphasized that the capability is new, and not branding something that had always been in the system to address one of today’s top hot button security issues.

“The ransomware detection capability is a brand new for us, through a new algorithm,” Richards said. “Companies provide training of end users not to click, but that doesn’t fully work, and they provide anti-virus protection, but once ransomware does breach the system, we as a backup vendor are in a very unique position to deal with it.”

The secret sauce here is the ransomware detection capability combined with the extremely frequent backups.

“Modern ransomware will lock a system down so you can’t fix it,” Richards said. “It means that the only way to fix it is to go back right to the point in time before u were infected and you can do that, because we do backups as frequently as every five minutes. This means that the MSP can point out the infection to a customer, in many cases before the customer even knows of the infection. They can then restore to the point before the infection took place.”

Other enhancements to SIRIS 3 include advanced screenshot verification, providing script execution to ensure the viability of complex backups. A local instance of Datto Drive, the file sync and share solution the company introduced earlier this year, has been made available. Four new device options – the all flash 2 TB S3X2, and new 80, 100 and 120 TB enterprise devices, have also been added.

Datto NAS 3 has added Infinite Cloud Retention (ICR), which lets customers save all of their data to the Datto Cloud indefinitely, regardless of capacity used. Richards notes that this enhancement is also helpful against ransomware.

“Before, the amount of data saves was time-based or capacity-based, so you saved ‘x’ gigabytes or ‘x’ years worth of data,” he said. “This means that you no longer have to do any trimming of backups, which is valuable for restores generally, and valuable for combatting ransomware. You can back it all up forever as long as you are a customer.”

Datto NAS 3 is also available with all new hardware, as well as block level deduplication for local shares. A local version of the Datto Drive file sync product is now available. In addition, Datto has announced NAS Guard, a new capability that lets Datto NAS connect with and back up any data stored anywhere on local network storage, not just ones with Datto agents on them.

“We created NAS Guard because there are a lot of things on the network that have storage, but which you can’t put a Datto agent on,” Richards said. “So how do you back up that data? That’s where NAS Guard comes in. It allows any data to be backed up onto the Datto NAS, so you can roll it back and restore it if necessary.”

Several enhancements were made to Datto Backupify, Datto’s cloud-to-cloud data protection solution.

“New seat management capabilities now let you manage costs for a customer, because you can choose which users are backed up,” Richards said. “It brings that granularly down to the user level.” New pricing tiers were announced, but these are only relevant to EMEA, as they had already been introduced in Canada and the U.S.

A new management panel was also introduced, to simplify the management, monitoring and troubleshooting of customer accounts via the partner portal. Partners can now easily purchase and provision Datto Backupify licenses to protect their customer’s data in the cloud.

“There is also now a Partner SaaS store for Backupify, which lets a partner easily purchase licenses through the SaaS store,” Richards added. “Being able to do them online on your time makes it easier for a partner to tap that license steam.”

Two Factor Authentication for the Partner Portal has also been added.

“There were a lot of requests for this from partners, and so we put it in,” Richards said.