In 2022, one in five UK businesses who suffered a cyber attack identified it as ransomware. A sophisticated and ever-evolving threat, this disables files and systems unless a financial sum is paid.
Such a risk to business continuity, reputation, and income sits alongside other external and internal threats to your data in our globally connected world, particularly with the move in archiving from tape to disk.
These risks and the subsequent potential irreversible damage make including robust data backup a critical part of any IT strategy.
Against this backdrop, we ask how important are immutable back-ups to protect your data against all risks, malicious, human error or otherwise.
What are the risks to your data?
Before we look at the effectiveness of immutable backups in protecting your data and ensuring compliance with regulations, it is essential to examine the risks to your data.
External Risks: Alongside ransomware, hacking, and other criminally minded cyber-attacks that will corrupt, encrypt, degrade, or delete stored data, natural disasters out of your control, such as fire and flood, could leave your hardware and valuable data ruined if not backed up offsite.
Internal Risks: Contrary to popular belief, one of the biggest threats to your data security can be from inside your organisation. Disgruntled former employees with IT access, human error due to poor training, lack of knowledge or IT awareness, poorly controlled access/management policies or an unstructured infrastructure, and hybrid working across multiple devices in different locations are all examples of vulnerability where data breaches can occur.
Most organisations do not have a method for addressing either of these risks. Often, backups are stored on a disk onsite, making it electronically accessible and vulnerable to direct internal and external attacks.
In addition, such historic and often poor-performing storage methods with poor climate control and humidity do not protect your data from long-term concerns that develop over time, like bit rot or data decay, leaving it unreadable and unreliable.
How to improve your data security:
You can improve your data security and protect your business in various ways.
- Multi-factor authentication (MFA) protects your data by ensuring a robust access process to prove user identity. A user can only access the data if they produce two verification methods. This prevents someone with malicious intent simply using a password to see private information.
- Extended recycle bin (delaying garbage collection) – human error occasionally leads to mistakenly deleting vital information, often permanently. This method ensures that the period in which it is held in the recycle bin is extended, allowing recovery to occur.
- Copy backups to immutable storage in the cloud – an immutable backup is a file that cannot be altered, corrupted, or destroyed in any way. This means that should your data be attacked, it is completely protected and unchanged. The benefit of this in a ransomware attack or with any data loss incident is that no time is wasted, no data is harmed, and business continuity remains unaffected.
Brightsolid Back up as a service Solution (BaaS) offers extensive security features that protect your business-critical data and mitigate the risks from threats and incidents.
One of the most effective in the next level of security is storing data on immutable, air-gapped back-ups with external access blocked in various methods. This ensures that only key identifiable stakeholders have access, your data is protected, and, in case of a breach or loss, can be recovered quickly and efficiently.
As well as this, storing data and workloads on malware-resistant architecture prevents the execution of a ransomware attack by scanning for malware and quarantining and deleting affected backups.
Discover more about the complete and secure protection we offer and speak to one of our friendly and knowledgeable team today.