With the rise of AI-powered ransomware, it’s more important than ever before to secure your data against emerging cyber threats as they continue to threaten businesses around the world.
Roughly 71% of businesses reported an increase in the frequency of cyberattacks over the past year while 61% reported an increase of cyber attack severity in the same time frame, according to statistics. Some businesses might underestimate the risk of cyber attacks which could lead to under investing when businesses are looking to securing data.
Businesses, especially rapidly growing ones, often generate a lot of data. A lot of data is stored in virtual environments, such as Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware vSphere. Over 65% of companies use at least 3 hypervisors, according to reports.
As companies often choose to deploy virtual machines to run their tasks, this means that the virtual machines they run must be secured to protect against sudden data loss and malware attacks, and to ensure critical business operations run at all times.
In order to thoroughly protect against the threat of ransomware, businesses are advised to follow the 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategy. Safeguard multiple copies of your backups onto at 2 different types of media, store at least one copy off-site, ensure data is offline, and verify your backups to ensure backup recoverability when needed.
Manual VM protection could lead to gaps in coverage
Manually backing up virtual machines, especially at scale, can be labor-intensive and could lead to data silos. IT personnel might forget to back up a rarely used virtual machine. Or different IT personnel may apply different protection policies, leading to inconsistent data protection.
Some data might not have been backed up at all, while other data might have been backed up with separate backup tools, leading to a fragmented backup infrastructure.
To ensure virtual machine resiliency, corporations need to backup and store their VM data at a secure location to ensure the data is available for recovery when needed.
To streamline VM protection, companies should ensure that their data can be automatically detected and backed up on a regular basis. As business data is often scattered, all VM data should be consolidated on a single platform so IT can easily monitor and manage VMs, regardless of their location.
Safeguarding your backups is definitely a priority. But it is also essential that your backups are verified to ensure they are good to go. Backup verification is essential to ensure there are no issues with your backups and that an accurate copy of your data is preserved. After your VMs are backed up, check to see if it runs via a built-in hypervisor.
When looking to back up and recover corporate data, speed is a factor businesses should consider. You don’t want your backups taking up too much time. In the event of a disaster, you’ll want to recover your data as quickly as possible, ideally within minutes, to ensure business continuity and meet RPOs and RTOs. Data restoration should be flexible, with full restore or granular recovery options, as well as cross-hypervisor restoration.
Data deduplication is also a key factor that helps with cutting down your backup and restore speeds. With the removal of duplicate data, your storage capacity is also optimized while your backups sizes are reduced.
Legacy data on virtual machines usually needs to be stored for a specific amount of time to meet internal or external compliance requirements such as HIPAA for healthcare, GDPR, or ISO 27001. In order to meet long-term retention requirements, companies would need to set up retention policies to store data for a specific period of time.
How Synology ActiveProtect helps companies streamline VM protection
For companies looking to streamline and consolidate their virtual machine protection, Synology ActiveProtect is a solid option. ActiveProtect is a purpose-built appliance with backup, recovery, monitoring, and advanced security capabilities, all of which help ensure the resilience of your virtual machines, such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V.
With ActiveProtect, follow the 3-2-1-1-0 policy to create and store offline copies of your backups, store multiple copies of your backups off-site via on-prem or cloud options, and ensure zero errors with automatic backup verification and self-healing capabilities to repair corrupted data, if any.
To ensure backups and recovery are swift, Synology ActiveProtect’s advanced deduplication engine captures modified blocks of data, which are integrated into standalone backup images that are immediately recoverable. Global deduplication is used to remove redundant data, reducing storage usage and transfer size and optimizing backup speed. Users can also restore VM data at the file or folder level or via instant or full restoration to VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, or the built-in hypervisor.
As companies today face internal or external regulatory requirements, ActiveProtect allows companies to set up retention policies that specify where to store backup copies and for how long. Businesses can choose between on-prem and cloud remote storage options such as select Synology NAS, AWS S3, C2 Object Storage, Wasabi Cloud Storage, and more. Learn more
Users can also tier out their data to free up storage space on their appliance, using a remote storage option of their choice, while continuing to monitor and manage their remote data with Synology ActiveProtect.
Start protecting your VMs with Synology ActiveProtect today.