Does your organisation have a ransomware backup strategy to protect your data and content in the event of a cyberattack?
Posted on 27 June 2017 -
BY Tibus
If you’ve been watching the news over the past few months you cannot help but have had ransomware brought to your attention. Ransomware is a type of cyberattack in which your data and content is effectively taken hostage by a hacker who says they will only release your data if a ransom fee is paid. Of course, there is no guarantee that this will actually happen even if you do pay the ransom.
With that in mind, it is worth planning in advance for such an attack. Do you have a ransomware backup strategy? If not, putting one in place quickly could end up saving you a lot of time and money.
Creating a comprehensive backup plan is the best way of guarding yourself against the consequences of a ransomware attack, even if your security provisions do not prevent you being affected by the attack itself. That’s because you can simply revert to a backup version of your website and data that pre-dates the attack to render the hacker’s efforts useless.
You need to calculate how frequently your organisation ought to perform a backup. A daily backup is the most common preference and if you are generating content or data each day that you cannot afford to lose, it is probably the best option for you, too. In that scenario, you would just go back to the previous day’s backup and only lose any work that has been done since then. That is probably preferable than having to pay the ransom and certainly more preferable than losing all of your work permanently.
A key thing to remember is that if your backup is being made on the same network as the data is being hosted, it is likely to be affected equally by any ransomware attack. For that reason, it is important to ensure that your backup is being stored off-site.
We discuss some of the options in more detail in those blog post on disaster recovery strategy. All of the discussion points are equally applicable to a ransomware backup strategy.
Another consideration is the cost of the backup. If the amount you’re paying to create a backup is more than what you stand to lose in the event of a ransomeware attack, that is not a very favourable situation. Buying the equipment you need to create a professional, off-site backup system is expensive, and that is before you factor in the cost of managing and maintaining a Grandfather, Father and Son (GSM) backup hierarchy.
We’ve recently launched our Veeam Cloud Connect backup as a service, which provides a comprehensive backup service at a reasonable price. We partner with IT consultancies and IT support providers to deliver backup provisions for their clients. If you’re interested, talk to your IT partner about our service and ask them to get in touch to discuss your ransomware backup strategy.
