Businesses are increasingly being targeted by ransomware attacks. The crippling nature of these attacks makes it necessary to take precautions now. Data impacted by a ransomware attack can be rendered unusable, be captured and released to the competition, or see customer information revealed to public eyes. Any one of these can severely impact business operations as well as your reputation.
It is becoming more and more common for businesses to use the cloud for data archiving and storage. It is important to realize, though, that using the cloud for your backup strategy will not mitigate all the risks that your data faces regarding ransomware. You want to make your data as clean as possible, and there are best practices that can allow you to keep the data in your backups safe, thus helping you recover from an attack without making a payment to nefarious parties .
Traditional Backup Strategies Are Outdated
Performing incremental and full data backups at regular intervals has served IT departments well. However, these often assume that the data being stored by the end user is clean, meaning it is free of security threats. This means that if backed-up data is compromised, it will likely unleash its destructive payload once restored.
This data backup strategy neglects the level of modern security required to navigate a ransomware world. And, although hardening your data security practices to ensure clean, safe data is a great start, backups also need to be protected from ransomware to ensure comprehensive data security.
Your Users Are the First Line of Defense
Since most data is created or moved by the end user, ensuring that the information on your network is clean starts with them. You must educate them on phishing attacks while preventing them from opening compromising emails or infected attachments. Further, key to clean network data starts with ensuring that the information placed on the network by an end user is clean when it leaves their device. Accomplishing these key goals prevents ransomware-infected files from moving around your network.
File shares and data syncing tools such as Microsoft OneDrive contribute to the rapid spread of ransomware throughout the organization. Ensuring that the data entering these tools is clean from the start will go miles toward ensuring clean data backups.
Cloud Backup Adds an Extra Layer of Data Protection
It is likely that your business uses the 3-2-1 approach to backing up business data. This means you have an offline copy of data, a readily available backup copy of data, and the original piece of data. Cloud-based storage is the perfect solution for storing your offline copies of data, and it can become a vital component for protecting valuable information from ransomware.
Data moved into and out of the cloud is encrypted by your software and solution provider, ensuring its safety. And, in the event of an attack on your business data, it can be restored first onto a cloud-based device, such as a virtual server, to ensure its cleanliness and integrity. This gives you an isolated sandbox in which to store, protect, and execute data restores, giving you a valuable tool against ransomware.
Click here to find out more about using cloud backups to protect against ransomware.
