By Deanna Hoover
Director of Product Marketing, Spectra Logic
In the current digital landscape, ransomware attacks pose a significant threat to businesses of all sizes and industries. Malicious attacks can result in severe damage, disrupt normal operations, and pose a threat to confidential data. Organizations impacted by a successful ransomware attack may face substantial periods of inactivity, financial losses, harm to their reputation, and may even be subject to regulatory fines. Additionally, there is no guarantee that paying the ransom will result in the recovery of all encrypted data, as the decryption keys may be incomplete or faulty.
To survive in this climate, organizations must prioritize cyber resilience and adopt robust data protection strategies to protect themselves from the increasing frequency and sophistication of ransomware attacks.
The Role of Backup Software in a Cyber-Resilient Data Protection Strategy
A comprehensive and cyber-resilient data protection strategy begins with proactive measures to prevent ransomware attacks from reaching backup data. Ransomware prevention is the focus and go-forward plan for all popular backup vendors. Modern backup software includes a number of proactive measures for ransomware prevention, including strict identity and access controls, regular software updates, immutable backups, and continuous checks for anomalies in data. These checks help organizations keep track of all the data coming in, and when an anomaly is identified, it can be quickly isolated for analysis. Solutions like Veeam, Cohesity, Rubrik, and others provide software that checks for anomalies in backups and isolates potentially compromised data. By identifying threats and compromised data before it goes into a secure longer-term storage repository, these software tools can prevent larger amounts of data from being corrupted and mitigate the impact of ransomware attacks.
What Happens When Cyber Threats Breach the Outer Lines of Defense?
While you shouldn’t overlook the importance of ransomware prevention software, it would be a mistake to stop there. So, you’ve implemented a top-of-the-line backup solution, but what happens if ransomware breaches your outer lines of defense?
Ransomware-resilient data storage solutions are an integral part of a fully ransomware-resilient architecture. These solutions focus on securing a local, uncorrupted copy of data, ensuring that businesses can quickly recover and resume operations in the event of an incident.
Modern object-based tape storage is particularly well-suited to complement backup solutions like Veeam, Cohesity, and Rubrik. By combining the flexibility of object storage with the security of tape technology, object-based tape solutions offer several advanced data protection capabilities, including:
Immutable Snapshots and Object Lock: Object storage solutions with immutable snapshots and object lock capabilities provide additional protection against ransomware. Immutable snapshots ensure that previous versions of data remain intact and can be restored in the event of an attack. Object lock ensures data cannot be rewritten or modified.
Air-Gapped Storage: Because tape cartridges are online only when the tape cartridge is mounted on the drive, tape technology’s inherent offline nature creates a “tape air gap,” an electronically disconnected or isolated copy of data that prevents threat actors from hacking, encrypting, or deleting data. An air gap is important because it creates a separation between your golden copy of data and potentially corrupted data in primary storage or another system within the backup infrastructure.
Off-Site Copy: The protection offered by air-gapped tape storage can be taken a step further with an off-site copy of data. A second copy of data on tape that can be ejected and stored at a different location is a truly unbreachable way to meet best practices for data protection. This adds an additional level of protection against not just a malicious attack but also a physical disaster or insider threat (human error, employee negligence, data theft, compromised vendors, and more). It means that there will always be a golden copy of data that is completely out of reach from any type of attack or disaster.
Ensuring Rapid Recovery with an Object Storage Interface
In the unfortunate event of a ransomware attack, organizations must have the ability to quickly recover and restore their data. This requires efficient data recovery processes that can be quickly employed after data anomalies to primary storage copies have been identified.
Object-based tape enables modern software compatible with Standard S3 and Amazon S3 Glacier to easily move data to and from tape storage. The solution facilitates rapid recovery and restoration of data. It provides a secure, local copy of data with all the benefits of the cloud from an ease-of-use standpoint and faster access times than cold cloud tiers. When compared to disk, object-based tape’s ability to preserve a truly offline, off-network copy of data offers a more reliable avenue for recovery – the cost advantages of tape mean organizations can cost-effectively retain multiple copies of data, which in turn ensures you can go back to the point in time that that data was not compromised.
Embracing Cyber-Resilient Data Storage
As ransomware attacks continue to pose a significant threat to organizations worldwide, implementing cyber-resilient data storage is paramount. By adopting proactive measures, leveraging secure data storage solutions, and ensuring rapid recovery and restoration capabilities, organizations can significantly reduce the impact of ransomware attacks and safeguard their critical data. Investing in cyber resilience is not only vital for protecting business operations and reputation, but in today’s digital world, it is a matter of survival.
Contact us today to speak with an expert about implementing ransomware-resilient data storage technologies.
