Secure Your Backup Data Against Ransomware Threats

Time is money

Gartner DLP Leader

In the business world, time is money.

When it comes to the digital space, the time it takes to access your data is money.

The cost associated with data breaches and data loss has been on the rise for years, with some parts of the world experiencing a nine percent increase annually.  With recent Ransomware attacks, we expect this metric to increase – substantially.

Contrary to popular belief, these costs are mostly not associated with intellectual property theft or the compromise of sensitive information–although those certainly do makeup part of the damage. The single biggest factor contributing to loss from a data breach is actually the lost business revenue while the firm’s network is recovering. As more and more organizations are shifting their services to the digital space, an increasing share of revenue relies on the reliability and availability of those online services. If customers can’t access services, they don’t come back. It’s that simple. According to studies, this lost business makes up nearly 40% of the average cost of any given data loss incident.

Indeed, the key factor for any company recuperating from a breach or other inadvertent loss is deploying data backups quickly and efficiently.    

With this in mind, let’s dive into some of the best practices firms need to know about data backups and recovery.

The Fundamentals

The first thing about setting up an efficient backup system is that it should not be reliant solely on local hardware data centers. If machines are damaged or otherwise become compromised, it could be weeks before a network is back online (if ever). A reliable, secure, and scalable cloud capacity is absolutely essential for a modern backup strategy.

Second but equally important is defining backup schedules, or the times and protocols for backing up data. The specific points in time when data and system backups need to be worked out based on business requirements. For instance, some systems and data files might need to be backed up immediately every time they’re modified–these tend to be the project-critical files. Timing is also important in for factoring in the off-time backups often incur. This is why full backups often take place over the weekends or when outside office hours. 

The flip side of backup scheduling is retention span. For any company, keeping every backup forever isn’t feasible as this would require an unlimited amount of storage space. Therefore, after determining how frequently you need to back up your data, it’s also vital to consider how long you will need to retain each backup.   

Last but not least is determining access to backups. As the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been emphasizing for twenty years, the central element that allows the data sphere to work is connectivity. Simply put, this means the ability to grant data access to all the nodes of a network that need it. This has important implications for backup strategy. If backup files exist but the people who need those files don’t have access to them, the backup is essentially useless. A data recovery system must be set up to allow quick access to all individuals that require access for business continuity.  

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