As we continue our blog series at looking at the rise of Ransomware attacks, we also look at ways you can protect your organization from a technical level.
In the last quarter, global businesses saw a 50% in the daily average of attacks, compared to the first half of 2020. US ransomware attacks doubled (98% increase) in the last 3 months, making it the #1 most targeted country for ransomware, followed by India, Sri Lanka, Russia and Turkey.
The best way to protect against attacks is educating users to be weary of urgent emails from suppliers or senior leaders requesting payments. However, human error can still occur amongst the most clued up of staff so IT teams need to be prepared if attackers gain access to data.
What are Snapshots?
A snapshot is, put simply, a point-in-time, read-only copy of your data. It represents exactly what the data looked like at the time of “snapping” whether it was hours, days, months or even years ago. Snapshot copies are read only which means they cannot be infected by ransomware.
This of course makes them a valuable asset when recovering from a ransomware attack as you can simply roll back to a copy of the data before the attack occurs.
Does this mean that your organization is enjoying continuous data protection? Not necessarily as it depends on the detail.
Not all Snapshots are created equal. Many IT teams report on slow performance when recovering data which could cause serious downtime to an organization. This occurs particularly when moving old snapshots around a server estate leaving copy-on-write files behind. As snapshots are gathered, this is very timely.
Using Third Party Backup Providers to Store Snapshots
Storing Snapshots with a cloud backup provider removes the hassle and administration in storing them efficiently. If you experience an attack, you can simply contact your provider and they will deliver the snapshot within the agreed SLA.
HostedBizz works with Cloudian and Veeam to deliver this service. Using best of breed technology, we are able to make backup data copies unchangeable for a set period of time, which prevents hacker encryption or deletion and ensures a clean data copy for reliable recovery. The resulting security is comparable to offline storage.
When choosing your vendor, concentrate on ease of setup and use; support for compression of data; and compatibility with your hardware – especially with multiple storage platform types.