The Role of Backups and Disaster Recovery in Cybersecurity Resilience

Thursday, November 07, 2024 by Robert Azzopardi

At a recent event, "Safeguard Against Cyber Attacks," hosted by Smart Technologies and Melita Business, we discussed how Smart Cloud is designed to help businesses protect themselves from ransomware, whilst ensuring business continuity through robust backup and recovery solutions.

By Robert Azzopardi, CTO, Smart Technologies Limited

As cyber threats become increasingly sophisticated, no business is immune to attacks. With ransomware and other malicious tactics posing significant risks, it’s important for CIOs and CTOs to prioritise not only preventive measures but also solutions that guarantee quick recovery. This is where Backup immutability and Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions are crucial.

At a recent event, “Safeguard Against Cyber Attacks,” hosted by Smart Technologies and Melita Business, we discussed how Smart Cloud is designed to help businesses protect themselves from ransomware, whilst ensuring business continuity through robust backup and recovery solutions.

The Growing Threat of Ransomware

Ransomware has evolved significantly in recent years, transitioning from simple file encryption to more dangerous double-extortion tactics. These attacks not only lock your data but also threaten to release sensitive information unless a ransom is paid. The consequences for businesses are dire—financial loss, reputational damage, and significant disruption to operations.

During our event, we highlighted how phishing emails remain the most common entry point for ransomware, accounting for nearly 40% of attacks. What’s even more concerning is that backup systems themselves are becoming prime targets. Attackers now actively seek vulnerabilities in backup solutions, attempting to delete or encrypt backups, leaving organisations with no option but to pay the ransom.

Securing Your Data with Backup Immutability

Backup immutability has become a cornerstone in defending against ransomware attacks. At Smart Cloud, we implement immutability to ensure that your backup files are locked and unchangeable, even by system administrators. By enforcing a write-once-read-many (WORM) policy, we guarantee that your backups remain secure and intact, regardless of the circumstances.

Our S3 Object Storage solution offers configurable immutability settings, ensuring that ransomware cannot delete or encrypt your crucial backups. This preserves the integrity of your data, enabling you to recover from attacks without having to pay a ransom.

Multi-Layered Security and Backup Solutions

In addition to immutability, we at Smart Cloud implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all administrative access to backup systems. This extra layer of security ensures that even if an attacker gains login credentials, they won’t be able to access the backup system without passing an additional authentication check.

To further enhance security, we also employ dual authorisation, ensuring that any request to alter or delete backup policies requires approval from at least two administrators. This system minimises the risk of ransomware or internal threats compromising your backup environment.

Disaster Recovery Solutions for Seamless Continuity

In today’s fast-paced business environment, having robust disaster recovery solutions in place is essential. Smart Cloud’s disaster recovery services provide real-time replication and failover systems, ensuring minimal disruption during a ransomware attack or any other critical incident. Our solutions include:

  • Application Replication for key databases such as Oracle and Microsoft.
  • Hardware Replication for data volumes between sites, supporting platforms like HPE and Dell.
  • Virtual Machine Replication for environments such as VMware, Hyper-V, and KVMs (Kernel-based Virtual Machines)

This level of redundancy allows businesses to maintain operational resilience, ensuring that systems are always up and running and that data integrity is preserved, even during a disaster.

With the growing threat of cyberattacks, all businesses need to adopt a proactive and resilient approach to Backup and Disaster Recovery. Our Smart Cloud solutions provide not only backup immutability, multi-layered security, and disaster recovery options, but also the infrastructure and expertise needed to ensure that your business remains protected and operational, no matter the challenge.

Find out more about how Smart Cloud can protect your data and ensure your business continuity here: melitabusiness.com/hosting-cloud/cloud-backup-solutions/

Robert Azzopardi

Robert Azzopardi

Chief Technology Officer Smart Technologies Ltd.

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