editor ’ s question
? ur advice to
O customers that are building their ransomware survival kit is that it is critically important to have the strategy , policies and tools in place to both avoid ransomware attacks , as well as to recover – quickly , efficiently , affordably and completely .
One needs only to read today ’ s news to know that no matter the size , location or industry of your organisation , the likelihood of getting targeted by bad actors is more likely than not .
This is due to the fact that for those that are not thoroughly armed with both protection and recovery capabilities , ‘ the business model works spectacularly for the criminals ’ as Joseph Blount , the Colonial Pipeline CEO , explained recently when discussing the cyberattack that would ultimately cost his company tens of millions of dollars .
Indeed , ransomware continues to evolve and become increasingly intelligent and ruthless , employing such capabilities as watching for cloud account credentials , deleting backups and cloud storage , and then encrypting everything and demanding a ransom . The right backup , however , can be an organisation ’ s ransomware recovery panacea .
Today , many of the major cloud providers support object locking , also referred to as Write-Once-Read-Many ( WORM ) storage or immutable storage . Users can mark objects as ‘ locked ’ for a designated period of time , preventing them from being deleted or altered by any user .
Our advice is to find a backup solution that has been engineered to integrate seamlessly with this new object lock feature to create immutable backups . Users can set a retention period for immutable backups stored on supporting cloud platforms .
Within this immutable retention period , backups cannot be deleted by any user , even if ransomware or a malicious actor acquires the root credentials .
In addition , the backup should provide powerful policy-based scheduling that allows it to predict when those backups will leave the retention policy and protect any files that will no longer be retained , ensuring businesses always have pointin-time backups to restore within the immutable retention policy window . u
Our advice is to find a backup solution that has been engineered to integrate seamlessly with this new object lock feature to create immutable backups .
JG HEITHCOCK , GM , RETROSPECT
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