What Is VM Backup Encryption and How to Encrypt VM Backup?

Virtual machine can help companies change the way they worked before but like physical machine, virtual machine still needs data protection. VM backup should be one of the daily jobs of IT administrators.

The simplest VM backup method is copying or exporting the VM from the datastore and saving it in another storage. When the VM failed, IT administrators can replace the VM folder with the VM export.

Simple method seems saving a lot of time but there will be also a lot of problems. For example, if you have massive VMs to backup, manually exporting VMs can be time-consuming. You can try adding multiple VMs to one backup job.

Simple VM export also can't provide enough protection to IT environment. You should upgrade your backup solution like encrypting VM backup.

Why you should encrypt VM backup?

Virtualization technology is often used by companies and cyberattackers also know this so they would like to steal valuable data from virtual machines.

There are many ways to protect data from unauthorized access. IT administrators can grant access to different users and set complicated passwords for data protection.

VM backup is often saved in different storage and might have not the same level of protection. If the VM backup is stolen, the data will be leaked, too.

Therefore, encrypting VM backup can build another layer of protection to IT environment. Even if the backup is unexpectedly leaked, the data will still be safe.

Vinchin helps encrypt VM backup in two ways

Vinchin Backup & Recovery is a professional VM backup and disaster recovery solution supporting multiple virtualization platforms including VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, XenServer, XCP-ng, Red Hat Virtualization, oVirt, Oracle Linux KVM, OpenStack, etc.

Vinchin Backup & Recovery helps not only encrypt VM backup data but also the transmission process. Data transmission encryption can also provide another layer of protection to VM data.

When the VM backup job is triggered, the backup system will start to backup the VM data and transmit the data to backup storage. During process, Vinchin Backup & Recovery will encrypt the transmission with SSL protocol, which is a popular encryption technique to prevent data transmission from being read or modified during data transmission via the Internet.

Before it is written into the backup storage, the backup data will be encrypted with AES-256 encryption technique, which is considered the safest encryption technique. You might ask how safe it is. The answer could be that the attackers would rather kidnap the IT administrator than crack the AES-256-encrypted data by themself to get the real data.

There is the third layer of data protection in Vinchin Backup & Recovery. When companies' IT environments are attacked by ransomware, IT administrators would like to recover VM from backup but in some situations, the backup storage will be also attacked.

This will never appear in Vinchin backup system. Vinchin ransomware protection technology will monitor the data in backup system in real time. Only Vinchin's applications can modify data in backup storage and any data by modified unauthorized applications will not be written to backup storage so the VM backups in your backup storage will be always available.

This is a user case that our customer's IT environment is attacked by ransomware and all VM data is wiped. Because the backup storage is well protected by Vinchin Backup & Recovery, user's IT environment gets revived quickly from the disaster.

Some users would like to deploy a secondary datacenter for disaster recovery. Vinchin Backup & Recovery will help add the secondary datacenter to the backup system and easily transmit local backup date. Of course, data transmission will be encrypted during the process.

To encrypt VM backup, you just need to turn on the related encryption options. Simple steps but powerful protection.

Vinchin Backup & Recovery has been selected by thousands of companies and you can also start to use this powerful system with a 60-day full-featured free trial. Just click the button to get the installation package.

Sum Up

VM backup is the basic protection for virtual environment. To upgrade the protection solution, you can encrypt the VM backup to prevent data leakage if the backup data is stolen.

Vinchin Backup & Recovery will help encrypt the backup data and data transmission, double insurance, so don't miss the free trial.