Lock a SP client node and all its backup and archive data to prevent changes and deletions

In case of a ransom ware attack, customer immediately locks affected Storage Protect Client nodes to prevent attacked nodes from accessing the Storage Protect server. This is done to prevent changes to the Storage Protect clients backup and to prevent new, malicious backups from being inserted to the Storage Protect server.

In a next step the customer wants to preserve all Storage Protect clients data on the Storage Protect server. Preserve means, the data must not be expired or deleted in some way. Today it will only be possible to exclude the affected Storage Protect client from expiration. Nevertheless, a Storage Protect administrator will be able to expire the Storage Protect client's data manually, for example by running expiration to the affected Storage Protect client manually, specifying the Storage Protect client node name.

Customer is requesting the possibility to lock/ freeze a Storage Protect client's data which exists on the Storage Protect server. This should not be limited to archive data but include all data of a Storage Protect client.

A potential implementation could be to enhance the Storage Protect server command "lock node" by adding the option to retain/ preserve and protect all Storage Protect clients data. For example:
LOCK NODE node_affected_by_ransomware_attack PRESERVEDATA=YES
or
UPDATE NODE node_affected_by_ransomware_attack PRESERVEDATA=YES

If PRESERVEDATA=YES will be specified,

• the Storage Protect server should not delete (expire) and change the locked node's data in any way and

• no administrator should be allowed to delete the locked node's data unless the node will be unlocked and

• the Storage Protect client itself should not be allowed to delete any data (PRESERVEDATA=YES implies ARCHDELETE=NO and BACKDELETE=NO for the node); if a node is locked, it cannot access the Storage Protect server anyway.

Using UPDATE NODE instead of LOCK NODE would allow to unlock a node, for example for a restore operation, and still preserve all node's data.