The pandemic has led to significant demand for the Cybersense ransomware solution, which is integrated with Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery, and goes to market through Dell, IBM Resiliency Services, and their partners.

Cybersecurity vendor Index Engines has announced new enhancements to CyberSense, their ransomware detection and recovery software. The new version features increased data throughput for analyzing backup images, and support for new database workloads, including SAP HANA and Microsoft Extensible Storage Engine [ESE], as well as a new aggregation option to a central cloud repository.

Index Engines has been in business since 2004, although CyberSense is a newer product, which was initially released in April 2018.

“What Google did for the Internet, making it searchable, was of great value, and our goal was to do this for enterprise data, and be, effectively, the Google of the enterprise around data management and migration products,” said Jim McGann, Vice President at Index Engines. “Indexing data and backup data has been our focus, with technology that supported large, complex data sets.”

While CyberSense is a newer part of the business, these days, thanks to the pandemic, it is bringing in most of the revenues.

“This year, due to COVID, the ransomware product is 90% of our business, because companies are ill-prepared to cope with these attacks,” McGann said.

CyberSense is designed as a last line of defense anti-ransomware products. It is integrated with the Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution, and resold through Index Engines’ two key strategic partners, Dell Technologies and IBM Resiliency Services.

Right now, our focus is entirely on Dell and IBM and their channel partners,” McGann noted. “Their sales forces, and their partners’ sales forces, are our channel for this.

“CyberSense is not real time, but next time the customer replicates into the vault, CyberSense will see corruption due to a cyber attack,” McGann indicated. “It will let the customer know to restore the previous backup and get rid of ransomware that’s corrupting the data. None of the other tools on the market really check the integrity the way we do. Commvault and Rubrik have some capabilities there, but we look inside every file and every database.”

CyberSense customers run the spectrum from the relatively small to the very large.

“We have some local school systems as customers who put a TB in the vault, and large financial services ones who have multi petabytes,” McGann said.

The enhancements in the 5.1 version of CyberSense simplify cloud orchestration.

“The new version effectively doubles the throughput and the performance,” McGann stated. “This is the most important of the enhancements. We have increased data throughput for analysis of backup images, including virtual backups. We need to be able to do this at a high scale to support this, with added parallellism for multiple indexing streams. Now with 100 TB of data, you can use a single server to process it.”

New database workloads have had support for CyberSense’s analytics and integrity validation added.  These include the SAP HANA database and the Microsoft Extensible Storage Engine (ESE), also known as JET Blue which is a core component of Microsoft Exchange Server and Active Directory.

The third new feature is an option that aggregates CyberSense stats from clients into a central cloud repository.

“It pushes out the stats so the Machine Learning model can train on that and just get smarter,” McGann noted. “There is no sensitive data in these stats, just the anonymous data from the scans. It helps everyone across the universe by sharing the data, and improving the ML algorithms.”