We’ve been data experts for the past 20+ years. We understood IoT before it was even a term and have been tracking the trends ever since. Today, data is so much a part of every type of business that cyber-criminals have an endless source of ransomware prospects and have built a $6B industry with their efforts. Back in the day, businesses made sure they had a back-up and recovery solutions to protect them from infrequent equipment failure; it was more like an insurance policy that they paid for but didn’t expect to use. Today, a protected back-up and a fast recovery solution are imperative to prevent huge losses and even potential business failure; not just from having to pay an average of $170K in ransom, but more importantly to avoid the average $1.85M loss that combines the actual ransom with the losses sustained by your organization’s inability to operate until its recovery is complete.
Even if a business has a protected copy of its data, it will pile up losses until all its data is restored and its systems, applications, networks, and desktops are working again.
To that end, Mavenspire focuses on speed to recovery. There are innumerable back-up and recovery solutions available, but if they will take weeks or months to recover your data, it may be too late for your business to survive. Here are 4 questions to ask your IT Security specialists, security consultants and/or vendors:
- Where does my Airgapped back-up live? An Airgapped back-up is supposed to be completely separate from your network so if a bad guy manages to break into your system, they can’t reach your back-up. Therefore Airgapped does not mean a copy in the cloud. If you can send the data there and see it then cyber-criminals will be able to access it too. Criminals don’t attack the data; they attack the infrastructure the data is sitting on. If someone claims immutable data, how are they delivering?
- Do we have a Data Recovery plan? What would it take to execute it? – Some businesses have a backup, and they have tools that say they CAN recover, but they have never really done it. Full recoveries can take much longer than expected and require building out whole new data centers to get it done.
- When is the last time we tested our Data Recovery process? Did it work? Even organized process-based IT organizations struggle to find the time to conduct proper DR tests. It takes a lot of people and resources, and sometimes short cuts are the only way to get it done. The downside is things can get missed, and recovery might not work as expected. This leads to additional time to get back online. BTW: Catastrophic events rarely go to plan.
- How long will it take to recover our networks and desktops so employees can get back to work? IT organizations are mostly focused on the most critical systems and data so when they think of recovery, they may not be including everything. In a recovery from a ransomware attack, this can lead to unforeseen delays and problems. For example, we’ve seen organizations recover key systems in a few hours, but then realize it will take days or even weeks to recover networks and desktops across the organization.
If you need a truly immutable back-up and a path to recovery that is measured in hours, not days, weeks or months, check out Mavenspire’s SMARTaaS Back-Up and Recovery solution. If your environment is pretty simple, we can provide you an estimate online. If your needs are more complex, we can work with you to tailor our solution to your needs.
