The first line of security against ransomware assaults should always be backups, but external storage and hard drives can be cumbersome and inconvenient. Although more effective, cloud-based backups can nevertheless become a target for cybercriminals if they are not adequately protected.
Solutions like Vinchin backup and recovery make it possible for your firm to recover swiftly from a ransomware attack without suffering significant data loss or interruptions to operations.
Ransomware backup best practices
It's important to briefly outline the recommended practices for creating backups before we look at strategies to protect them from ransomware.
Keep your eyes on the prize: Using a backup to successfully restore business activities without severe data loss is its ultimate goal. As you start developing a ransomware backup strategy, keep the end in mind.
You can start developing a backup procedure once you've decided which crucial business functions you'll need to be able to recover in the event of an attack.
Backup as though you'll be attacked: 75% of firms experienced a ransomware attack last year, according to Security Report. These companies had downtime on average for six days. Attacks by ransomware are becoming a matter of "when," not "if."
Making the proper partner to back up your email data will put you one step ahead of thieves, which is why preparation is so important. Additionally, properly encrypted and stored cloud-based backups make it more difficult for hackers to locate and access them.
Develop a multifaceted strategy to thwart ransomware attacks: Backups are a fantastic first line of defense against ransomware for your business. But it won't be enough to resolve the issue by itself.
It's crucial to consider additional preventive methods of fighting ransomware, such as programs that check incoming emails for harmful attachments or Security Awareness Training that involves staff members in securing your company. Even more crucially, it makes it less likely for it to spread through your environment if you have a cybersecurity ecosystem of partnerships built to give end-to-end ransomware protection.
Implementing these backup best practices increases your company's chances of a low-impact ransomware occurrence and a quick, complete recovery in the event of a successful breach.
Ransomware backup strategies
Here are eight strategies for defending the backup data in your company against ransomware assaults.
- Create a catastrophe recovery strategy.
Disaster recovery plans (DRPs) are procedural manuals that describe how a company reacts to events that can adversely affect its systems and everyday operations. Instances, where a business needs to rely on its DRP to restore systems, include weather occurrences, human mistake, hardware failure, and cybercrimes like ransomware.
An effective disaster recovery strategy includes a ransomware backup protection strategy. It responds to issues like:
What information will the company back up? The amount of data that businesses produce makes it practically impossible to fully back up every system. Because of this, it's crucial to determine what the company really requires.
How often will data backups be performed? Knowing your maximum probable data loss allows you to choose a backup interval. Your maximum loss, assuming daily backups, would be 24 hours' worth of business data. A shorter backup interval could significantly reduce data loss to just a few hours. Vinchin Backup & Recovery provides cloud-based email backup and recovery solutions that sync up to six times per day.
Where will the data be kept? In the past, backups were kept on-site in hard drives. The main benefit of this is that data is entirely offline stored, rendering it fully unavailable to attackers.
But when businesses adopt remote work and open additional offices, cloud-based storage becomes far more practical.
Large amounts of data can now be totally off-site stored using cloud-based storage solutions, or they can be combined with on-premises storage to create a hybrid solution that keeps data safe from ransomware assaults.
How will the information be protected? The sensitivity of the data being saved should determine what security controls should be used to back it up. For instance, information containing protected health information (PHI) must comply with laws like HIPAA or GDPR.
How often will the company test its backups? The organization should specify a timeframe in the disaster recovery plan for testing backups. Companies often do annual tests, with additional tests conducted on-demand in the event that significant modifications are made to the company's hardware or software solutions.
- Maintain at least one offline or offshore backup.
Making ensuring they can't be breached is the most crucial part of safeguarding backups from ransomware, aside from actually implementing backups. One of the greatest methods to make sure ransomware can't affect a backup is to keep it offline or physically remote.
- Keep backups in various places.
The need to store data in several locations cannot be overstated, whether you utilize on-site data centers or cloud-based ones. Disaster recovery relies heavily on redundancy because it guarantees system dependability through replication. By storing backup data in numerous places, the business will still have access to the others even if ransomware corrupts one backup.
- Select an appropriate backup interval
"As regularly as possible within reason" is the ideal backup frequency. Naturally, it depends on your storage capacity, the backup solutions you have in place, and the volume of data your company produces.
If your company is tiny and only has a few employees, you might be able to afford to back up once every day. The business continuity objectives may be better supported by more regular backups in large organizations with thousands of employees.
- Regularly perform software updates
Ransomware looks to exploit vulnerabilities in your system, and few things make systems easier to exploit than failing to perform regular software updates. Since the data you backup needs to be the cleanest and most recent available, it’s critical that all systems are regularly backed up and kept on the most up-to-date version.
Otherwise, restoring data from previous system versions could cause an import to fail.
- Inform staff about backup procedures.
Individual staff computers, your company's email system, and your larger infrastructure all receive backups. Employees need to be informed about the value of backing up their data using a hard drive or cloud-based solution, unless your company has automatic cloud backups for employee information.
Employees can learn from training sessions the value of data backups and what they can do to help stop ransomware attacks.
- Control employee backup access
It seems sensible to give only a select few people or one system account access to backups. Fewer people having access to the passwords implies there is less chance for a human mistake to compromise it.
- Test copies
Even if backing up your data is a good idea, it is useless unless a team can use the backup to regain system access. Automating system recovery would be the best scenario. That entails putting the required code in place so that pressing a button will trigger an automatic data retrieval and restoration process.
You may always outsource backups to a vendor like Vinchin if your team lacks the capacity to carry out routine checks. In the case of an attack, they can work with you to protect backups from ransomware and enable quick recovery of email mailboxes, contact lists, calendars, and personal folders.
Protecting Backups from Ransomware
A corporation may experience major operational and financial effects as a result of data loss during a ransomware attack. Reducing the amount of time it takes to recover is crucial, and working with a software program like Vinchin makes it possible for your business to fully recover more quickly.
To find out more about how to shield your company's backups against ransomware, look at Vinchin Backup and Recovery solutions.
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