IT Security

Back up your data

by Mark Rowe

March 31 was World Backup Day, an annual holiday designed to remind people and organisations to effectively back up their critical data before they lose it either by accident or malice. The past two years have highlighted the importance of a sound backup strategy, writes Joe Noonan, Product Executive, Backup and Disaster Recovery for Unitrends and Spanning.

Cybercrime is rampant, with ransomware, account takeover attacks, and phishing schemes all proliferating. Against this backdrop, effective data backups are key to allowing businesses to preserve information, maintain functionality and restore and recover from an attack.

Organisations should look to implement unified business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions to prevent data loss incidents through malicious cyberattacks, natural disasters or accidental data deletion. Unified BCDR solutions include innovative security features, time-saving automation and the ability to back up anything, anywhere—crucial features in today’s evolving cyber threat landscape.

Scaling the cybercrime challenge

The scale of cyber threats escalated significantly over the past year—in fact, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) recently announced that it recorded a 2,650pc surge in phishing and a 423pc increase in malware attacks in 2021. Work-from-home (WFH) and hybrid models have created more challenges for IT professionals—especially with the rise in shadow IT, which is the use of software and devices without the explicit approval of the IT department. As the cybercrime landscape evolves, businesses must shift to a “not if, but when” mindset when assessing their security needs—which includes their BCDR strategy.

Unified BCDR

While World Backup Day may not be a major holiday on everyone’s calendar, it’s a good reminder for organisations to review their BCDR strategies to ensure that their businesses operate as close to normal as possible after an unexpected interruption, with minimal loss of data.

Disaster recovery is a key element of an organisation’s recovery strategy. Businesses need to determine acceptable downtime for critical systems and implement backup and disaster recovery solutions for those critical systems as well as SaaS application data. There is a common misconception in many organizations that SaaS providers will protect mission-critical data, but this is not the case. A key part of any business’s backup strategy should include SaaS backup, especially for key applications like Microsoft 365 that employees use daily.

To simplify the disaster recovery process, unified BCDR solutions use automated disaster recovery testing to ensure backups are ready when disaster strikes. Automation also plays a key role in day-to-day backup operations with unified BCDR solutions, with features that proactively fix common problems in the backup environment that eliminate wasted time on false alerts and backup remediation. Since technicians can spend up to 33pc of their day monitoring, managing and troubleshooting backups, organisations should look for solutions that provide a unified view from a single dashboard to help save time and reduce human error.

Every second counts when it comes to mitigating a cyberattack, so unified BCDR technologies that incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are critical in detecting anomalies in backup behaviours that are often the telltale signs of a ransomware attack. Organisations should look for solutions that use AI and ML to identify suspicious activity and alert administrators to possible ransomware before it spreads.

When assessing its BCDR strategy, organisations must take compliance regulations into account and ensure that data retention and backup policies adhere to these guidelines. Some organisations operate in highly-regulated industries like government or healthcare, which have strict mandates on how data must be secured, or have specific cyber insurance policies that dictate aspects like backup frequency. It’s critical that IT professionals truly understand their compliance regulations to avoid significant fines and reputational damage.

Looking ahead

While World Backup Day may come only once a year, adequate data protection is a 24/7/365 undertaking. By implementing unified BCDR technologies and regularly assessing their backup strategies, organisations will be better positioned to recover swiftly in the case of a data loss incident.

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