How Ransomware Proof Are Your Backups?
Your backup system is key part of your business growth and survival system. It ensures that a computer hardware failure will not cause your business to lose their files or data. But do you have ransomware proof backups? When your computers are infected with ransomware, will the cyber criminals also infect your backups and hold them for ransom? Or do you have immutable backups (backups that cannot be changed by you or the criminals) which you can quickly restore from. Immutable backups are part of the Golden Backup Rule.
On Premise Ransomware Proof Backups
There are a number of ways to make your local backups safe from ransomware.
- Hard drives are one of the most popular storage devices for local backups. There are some clever ways to help make hard drive backups safe from ransomware. Many clients use software such as Veeam Backup and Recovery to deploy a hardened Linux immutable repository onsite. This allows you to set a immutable time period to protect your data from ransomware at the drive file system level.
- Tape drives can be a valuable tool to protect against failure and ransomware. Tape drives can be set to write to a tape once but read many times (aka WORM), much like the old CD and DVD technology. A WORM tape is removed from the tape drive system and stored securely.
Cloud Ransomware Proof Backups
Cloud backups are used to protect both your computer systems and server onsite as well as the Cloud services that your company uses. For example, your Windows File Server can be backed up to a secure Cloud storage system. However, your Microsoft 365 Email and Sharepoint data can also be backed up to a secure Cloud storage system. Cloud storage can now also be set to be immutable. Some of the largest providers, such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3 offer a variety of immutable storage tiers in Canada. These can be readily managed with an immutable backup policy to protect your backup and data against ransomware.
Automated Restore Testing
Backups systems need to be schedule to be automatically tested. Many consumer backup systems, such as Apple’s Time Machine do not test the backups; this means that your backup may not work. Your business class backup system should automatically do a test restore to a spare system to ensure that not only are your backup systems working, but to also ensure that the backups are usable in the time your business needs them. For example, if your backups are on a discount Cloud backup storage system, it could take weeks to restore your company’s files and systems. Automatic testing will help highlight these problems before a disaster happens. Modern backup systems, such as Veeam, have this built in; in our experience, this has helped to uncover short comings for our clients. They were then able to put in fixes and reduce their recovery time.
