Off-site, secure, out of band backups are your only hope for recovery in a cyber event
Ransomware, the scourge of today’s business, is literally a click away from crippling your business and organisation.
A determined crypto-virus attack on your organisation can reduce the organisations chance to make money, it can impact your reputation and can cause problems for months if not years.
Even an accidental infection, most result from an accident, can cause similar effects.
In the event of a crypto-virus attack, especially for small and medium enterprises, you have 2 options.
- You pay the ransom – you may get your data back, you may get some of it back or you may get none of it back, we are after all talking about a criminal organisation that is holding your data to ransom.
- You recover from your backup.
Paying the ransom is up to you, most security and ICT companies will say not to pay.
If you have a security or ICT company, or someone in your organisation that does the job they would have told you to do a backup.
Your back up has to cover the following:
- It should be regular – depending on your requirements for the data and access to the data a back up should be completed every 24 hours. A better solution is to have an incremental backup every 15 minutes.
- It should have no human intervention – the backup has to run no matter what. If you are backing up to a hard drive, connected to your device and you require someone to change drives then human error comes into it. The old adage that the backup will fail the same day you need it is true.
- It should be off-site – As in totally away from the business but also not connected to the business except when it is doing a backup.
- It should be secure – all the data, no matter where it is stored should have encryption wrapped around it. It should be encrypted at rest (stored on the location), it should be encrypted in transport (getting there and back) and it should be encrypted if you are going to use it. This stops the information being stolen but also being accidentally accessed by the provider.
- It should be tested regularly – you have done a backup and that’s all I have to do. No, you need to test it regularly. Do a regular restore to test that it works and also to ensure that you are backing up ALL of your essential data. You do not want to be in a situation where a failure is your first test.
Achieving all of these components is difficult. Try talking to us or a reputable ICT and security provider concerning your options!
Click here for your free trial of a secure, out of band off-site backup solution.