With the rate at which ransomware is evolving, companies must take into consideration key data protection concepts as they implement, revamp, or update their existing backup infrastructure. This ensures that businesses can restore data and resume operations immediately when faced with sudden data loss.
Here are some key red flags to keep in mind when reviewing or crafting a cyber resilient data protection strategy:
Red flag #1 Incomplete backups
There’s a possibility that companies might forget to back up new workloads. If the data hasn’t been backed up, it might be forgotten. Or worse. Lost during a ransomware attack, only to never be found again.
Some businesses might choose to protect specific workloads while not backing up the rest of their data. This might be because they are worried that backing up all their data might take up a lot of time or a lot of storage space (or both). They might choose to use file-level backups instead of full system backups. With file-level backups, IT need to pick and choose which files and folders to protect, which could lead to partial workload protection.
In case of sudden data loss, full data restoration might not be possible if some of your data wasn’t backed up in the first place. This means that even if you are able to recover your data partially, it might not be enough to maintain business continuity. Full data recovery will only be possible if all your data was backed up in the first place.
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Red flag #2 Limited data visibility
Organizations struggle with data silos which limits data visibility, making it harder for businesses to access or restore all data. This often happens because teams work in silos, achieve their own targets, or use their own systems, which creates barriers between teams, leading to data being stored separately, instead of being consolidated on one platform.
As a result, data becomes fragmented. Businesses become unaware of which data they actually have and whether or not the data has been backed up. This could lead to redundant data, operational inefficiency, and degraded data quality, which could make businesses unable to meet SLAs.
This could also lead to issues with data recovery, and companies might be unable to meet compliance requirements, which could result in hefty penalties from the government. This is why data unification and an integrated backup solution are integral for businesses.
Red flag #3 Not securing your backups
Most organizations back up their data. However, they might not be doing enough to protect their backups. In the event of a ransomware attack, if only one backup copy exists, businesses may not be able to access their backups ever again. If this happens, companies could face financial losses, their business continuity plans could fail, and their data could be lost forever. It’s important to protect backups as well.
Businesses might aim to safeguard backups by creating backup copies. However, those copies might not be stored on secondary on-prem servers or in the cloud. Hackers could tamper with or delete essential corporate data if those backup copies aren’t immutable or stored at an isolated, secure off-site location.
Many companies are aware of the importance of disaster recovery drills. However, they may not have the time or bandwidth to test their backups regularly, so they may choose to put them off.
Companies should strive to store isolated backup copies at a secure off-site location to recover data in the event of sudden data loss. In addition, disaster recovery drills are crucial as this ensures that there are no issues with your backups and that they can be successfully recovered when needed. This is why it is essential for IT to schedule periodic disaster recovery drills.
Red flag #4 Data leakage risks
As a company grows, the number of employees increase which is when IT needs to start delegating access permissions to specific employees only. If everyone has access to all company data, the company could face insider threats such as an employee data breach.
Employees might abuse their privileges to compromise company data by sharing it with unauthorized personnel or malicious ex-employees might even choose to delete data as revenge. Companies should be mindful of restricting access to corporate data and delegating access only to those who require it.
Enforce least privilege access principles across all systems to limit the amount of employees that have access to mission-critical data. Set up access controls so that only employees with permissions are able to perform backups tasks, backup operations, and/or recover data.
Improve your security by using Single sign-on (SSO), Two-factor authentication (2FA), or Multi-factor authentication (MFA) to verify employee identity, and prevent unauthorized personnel from access corporate data. Companies can also go one step further and protect critical servers by setting up firewalls and restricting inbound and outbound connections to trusted IP addresses only.
Combat data protection red flags with a purpose-built backup appliance
In order to strengthen your data protection strategy, keep up with the times, and keep ransomware at bay, you’ll need an integrated backup appliance with powerful backup and recovery features so that you can safeguard your backups with a peace of mind.
Streamline business data protection and turn those red flags into green flags with Synology ActiveProtect:
Optimized backup performance and deduplication: Perform backups with speed with ActiveProtect’s modern backup capabilities and reduce overall bandwidth and storage consumption as duplicate data at the source and redundant data across the entire cluster is removed via global source-side duplication.
Automated and customizable backup strategy: Instead of manually backing up your data, set up custom backup plans that perform backups automatically without having to deal with human errors (or forgetfulness). Data visibility and data silos won’t be an issue anymore as all your data is protected and can be monitored and managed from one platform.
Follow the 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategy: Verify your backups via automatic backup verification, leverage immutable backups to prevent data tampering or deletion, and run disaster recovery drills with ActiveProtect’s built-in hypervisor. Isolate backups immediately with logical or physical air-gapping so that clean backup copies can be successfully retrieved and store backup copies off-site onto an on-prem or cloud repository for data redundancy.
Access controls: Choose who can access corporate data by setting up granular access controls policies so that only certain employees have access to backing up, viewing, or recovering data. Leverage firewalls to restrict access to data on backup appliances and set up a whitelist so that only trusted IP addresses can access the backup appliance.
Click here to find out more about ActiveProtect.