In today’s threat landscape, financial institutions must go beyond traditional disaster recovery strategies to ensure their most critical data’s integrity, availability, and survivability. Sheltered Harbor—a nonprofit industry initiative—has established standards for protecting customer account data in the event of a major cyberattack or operational disruption. At the core of these standards is the requirement for a secure, immutable, and isolated data vault (DV) that can be used to restore customer data even if all other recovery mechanisms fail.
As ransomware threats rise and regulatory expectations tighten, financial institutions must ensure critical data remains secure, immutable, and recoverable—even during worst-case scenarios.
In collaboration with AWS, Elastio—a trusted provider of Ransomware Recovery Assurance solutions brings advanced forensic scanning and validation capabilities to the architecture. Elastio enables institutions to confidently ensure that data entering the vault is clean, free from ransomware or malware, and restorable. Elastio complements the air-gapped, immutable design of the DV and adds another critical layer of assurance in support of Sheltered Harbor’s mandate for data integrity.
This blog AWS will explore building a Sheltered Harbor-compliant DV on AWS by mapping technical requirements directly to AWS-native services and trusted partner solutions like Elastio. Specifically, AWS focuses on:
- Creating a secure, survivable, and immutable data vault using services like Amazon S3 with Amazon S3 Object Lock, AWS Key Management Service, and AWS Identity and Access Management.
- Building an air-gapped architecture that logically isolates the DV from the institution’s production environment using AWS Organizations, AWS Direct Connect, and Amazon EventBridge.
- Incorporating forensic validation and ransomware scanning, where Elastio Ransomware Recovery Assurance plays a key role in ensuring data hygiene and readiness before it enters the vault.
AWS and Elastio offer a robust, cloud-native solution that aligns with Sheltered Harbor’s requirements, helping financial institutions move forward with confidence in their cyber recovery posture. Whether you’re a large national bank or an emerging fintech, this blog will help you understand how to operationalize Sheltered Harbor compliance using trusted tools and partners.
Whether you’re a fintech, bank, or insurer, this post provides guidance on safeguarding your most critical data.
Read the full blog and start building cyber resilience, the Sheltered Harbor way.
