The ransomware recovery plan
In recent years, ransomware attacks have become widespread and developed into a business model, with severe impacts in various industries, causing significant data and asset loss for organizations. The 2022 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report revealed a shocking statistic: a total of 6.233 billion ransomware attacks were reported worldwide in 2022, an average of 19 attacks per second. This underlines the urgent need for organizations to strengthen their defenses. Therefore, it is vital for IT administrators to have a comprehensive ransomware recovery plan as it can minimize the effects of an attack and restore business operations in the shortest possible time.
However, based on past experience, no organization can fully prevent all cyber attacks. Therefore, organizations must make “recovery” a priority. “Backup” is widely recognized as one of the most effective defenses against ransomware attacks: having up-to-date, secure and verified backups increases the likelihood of successful recovery while reducing downtime and minimizing the risk of data loss.
Key elements of a Ransomware recovery plan
Ransomware attacks represent one of the most challenging recovery scenarios for organizations. Affected businesses or institutions may face operational problems caused by the attack. Recognizing the nature of ransomware, Synology has analyzed and identified the key elements of a ransomware recovery plan:
1. No more data silos
With the advancement of technology and various developments, the tools used by companies in operations or development typically span multiple platforms. Neglecting certain workloads puts your organization at risk of ransomware attacks. Therefore, when it comes to backups, businesses need to avoid data silos and include all data in a comprehensive backup mechanism.
2. Efficient, fast backups
With the rapid growth of enterprise data, this data must not only be preserved for later analysis, but can also be transferred to the cloud or applied to IoT devices. For this reason, the amount of data required for backups in the organizational environment will only increase. Therefore, companies need a system that can back up data efficiently and quickly, and even if all data is fully backed up, it can significantly reduce the recovery point requirement (RPO) time interval.
3. Backup data retention period
The latency period of modern ransomware can be up to 30-90 days. Therefore, backup data must be stored efficiently and securely to cope with unexpected events, ensuring clean and recoverable data to maintain business continuity.
4. Testing backups for restoreability
Since organizations cannot predict when they will fall victim to ransomware attacks, in such an uncertain environment, the restoreability of backup data must be constantly tested and practiced. This not only helps increase the credibility of your backups, but also ensures that your organization is able to correctly execute and quickly recover from ransomware threats.
5. Inaccessible backup architecture
Common methods of ransomware attacks include encrypting an organization’s original data while simultaneously deleting existing backup data. Therefore, businesses’ backup data must maintain adequate security, have tamper-proof features, and be able to directly isolate ransomware in the network or physical environment, ensuring that the organization always has a clean and recoverable copy of the data.
6. Fast, flexible recovery
When organizations are hit by ransomware attacks, the primary goal is to ensure business continuity, which affects two critical points: “time” and “resilience.” To minimize downtime, instant recovery should be achieved to reduce recovery time (RTO). Also, since ransomware often targets a single platform, backups should have cross-platform and cross-hypervisor recovery capabilities to reduce recovery risks.
7. User-friendly, centralized management
The complexity of corporate IT environments is increasing. Although most companies use native protection mechanisms for backups, the high complexity of management can lead to human errors or omissions, making them vulnerable to ransomware attacks. Therefore, backups must have centralized management functions while providing data transparency to verify that all backups in the environment are working properly.
Data recovery
- Regular recovery practices: Ensures organizations regularly restore data to the on-board hypervisor for testing in a test environment. This enables recovery exercises without impacting operational sites, ensuring data recoverability.
- Support for multiple recovery methods: Provides diverse and flexible recovery capabilities, including Bare Metal recovery, file-level recovery, and database recovery. This allows companies to select the most appropriate recovery method based on their unique needs.
- Recovery of Heterogeneous Platforms: In case of an incident, real-time recovery is available in VMware or Hyper-V virtualized environments. You can quickly launch backups in these virtual environments to meet cross-platform recovery requirements, including P2V and V2V requirements.
Conclusion
Ransomware attacks have increased at an alarming rate in recent years, causing significant damage to businesses and organizations. Data protection and continuous operation have become a top priority for companies. Synology’s privacy solution follows best practices and defines the optimal “Ransomware Recovery Plan” for businesses. It strengthens your organization’s defenses against ransomware attacks, effectively helping businesses achieve uninterrupted operations.
Learn more about Synology’s backup and disaster recovery solutions