Evaluation of a New-Concept Secure File Server Solution

Abstract

Ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and defensive solutions must necessarily evolve. Unfortunately, automated backup management through validation—critical for data recovery after an attack—and strengthening file server protection are not sufficiently addressed in current protection strategies. To focus on this area, an architectural model has been developed that complements traditional central data storage with an additional high-level file server protection solution. However, in addition to the functional adequacy of file server protection solutions, the measurability of operational performance is also important. In order to validate and evaluate the developed ransomware-proof file server protection, a dynamic performance metric is introduced for comparability, by which the performance results measured on the tested client–server architectures are presented, together with the methodology and results of the measurements. Our results show that the investigated model does not cause any performance degradation when moving sensitive data files and their backups during operation and even shows performance improvements in some frequently used configurations. The result proves that the developed real-time approach provides a solution to this critical problem in terms of the time required to restore key data from backups and to ensure file availability and continuity of accessibility. Based on a review of the literature and available solutions, it is concluded that there is no integrated solution for implementing a similar concept in practice, and therefore, the developed model is a gap-filling in this priority area.