A multilayer approach to cybersecurity is the only effective way to deal with modern cyber threats. There are typically six layers in this approach – people, physical, network, server, application and data – but they all serve one common goal – to protect your data.
Time to strengthen your backup routines
Data recovery is an essential tool for recovering from a cyber incident, so it should also be one of the main focal points of your security strategy. As well as your main production data stores, hackers are also turning their attention to system backups.
A ransomware attack can be stopped quite effectively by restoring from a recent backup for instance – but only if a copy exists. By deleting or corrupting backups as part of the attack, ransomware extortionists have a far greater chance of convincing their victims to pay up.
Cloud backup can help
Effective backup relies on three layers of protection, also known as the 3-2-1 rule. Under this regime:
3 – the number of copies of your data
2 – the number of different media types
1 – the number of copies that must be stored offsite
When data volumes were smaller, the 3-2-1 rule could be easily managed with backup tapes or removable hard drives – one of the operations team could take a backup home each night.
As data sets have outgrown tape capacity, a new, more capable solution is required. And again, the cloud provides a solution.
In addition to infinitely scalable capacity, cloud storage also fulfils the offsite requirement of your 3-2-1 strategy. Local backups are still essential for rapid recovery operations, but the cloud provides an important fail-over if hackers successfully access your production data and copies.
Mitigating disasters
The reality is that ransomware and other cyberattacks are closer to a disaster than a simple data loss incident. The scale of damage can be huge, requiring a sophisticated disaster recovery (DR) response.
Trustworthy copies of your production data are an essential element of DR – as are the tools and processes required to bring line-of-business systems back into operation as soon as possible. Historically this may have involved deploying a second, identical data centre in a different location with data synced automatically to it. Although effective, this approach is extremely expensive – well out of budget for all but the largest organisations.
But cloud disaster recovery solutions solve many of these hurdles – including cost. You can configure a fail-over ‘site’ in the cloud without costly capital spend – you simply pay for what you use when you use it. If your on-premises data centre is compromised, you can immediately fail over to the cloud, allowing normal operations to resume within a matter of seconds – and without data loss.
The cloud DR platform continues to provide the operational services you need while allowing your cybersecurity team to allocate resources to deal with issues on-site. Importantly, adopting a disaster recovery approach to security breaches buys you time to recover data from backup without having to declare a sull system outage.
To learn more about the role of cloud backup in your cybersecurity strategy and how we can help protect your business, please give the WTL team a call.