When the pandemic began 18 months ago, organisations believed remote working would be temporary. However, in 2020 the number of people working from home (WFH) in the UK more than doubled and some businesses are now thinking of permanently allowing WFH or adopting a hybrid approach, says Joe Noonan, Product Executive, Backup and Disaster Recovery for the IT back-up company Unitrends, a Kaseya company.
Cybercriminals have taken advantage of the “new normal” remote work. IT security teams have less oversight of remote employees, and home environments are often significantly less secure than their corporate counterparts. Whilst hackers have never struggled to find new ways to infiltrate businesses, the transition to remote work during the pandemic presented them with the opportunity to launch even more sophisticated attacks. Last year alone, ransom payments jumped 31 per cent to $233,817 and 61pc of organisations in a recent Mimecast survey reported being impacted by ransomware. While cybercrime success rates continue to increase, the volume of data that needs protecting keeps expanding—analyst firm IDC found that 64.2 zettabytes of data were created in 2020 alone.
Integrating backup and security
Many companies had already started to integrate their backup and security strategies before the pandemic, and the continued evolution of the data protection landscape has made this shift in thinking a necessity in 2021 and beyond. As the sheer volume of data continues to grow and the number of threats continues to increase, it’s crucial that businesses equip themselves with integrated solutions that span both traditional security and backup functions to help prevent, anticipate and mitigate account compromise and data loss.
Unified business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions provide IT professionals with innovative security features, time-saving automation and the ability to back up anything, anywhere. As cyberthreats evolve, IT threat detection must evolve too. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies play a key role in detecting malware and anomalies in backup behaviours to stop malicious actors before they infect an entire network or gain access to critical data. In addition to ransomware protection, features like dark web monitoring and anti-phishing defence capabilities provide another layer of protection from pervasive threats like credential compromise and account takeover attacks.
With technicians spending up to 33% of their day monitoring, managing and troubleshooting backups, a truly unified solution is needed to provide a single view of the entire data landscape to save time and reduce human error. Automated tools that proactively fix common problems in the backup environment can help increase productivity and secure the environment, leaving more time for IT professionals to pursue more strategic initiatives.
Regardless of their size, businesses should prioritise a unified BCDR approach to stop cyberattacks in their tracks and keep their IT environments adequately protected from cybercriminals.
