Your essential company data is vulnerable to various risks, including cyberattacks like ransomware and human blunders such as accidental deletion. Simultaneously, continually increasing data quantities make managing and securing data more difficult than ever. However, the repercussions of failing to do so can be severe: lost or stolen data can disrupt business continuity, impede operations, harm your reputation, and, ultimately, impact your bottom line.
The cloud is critical to improving data resilience, but what is the best cloud defense? Here are five best practices to help you build an effective data resilience strategy for your organization.
What Are Immutable Backups?
Understanding the concept of an immutable backup solution is critical before implementing it. “Immutable” refers to data that cannot be changed or removed. Immutability in backups assures that once data is saved, it remains unmodified and resistant to alteration or erasure. Immutable backups are frequently designed to be kept for a set period before being deleted automatically. This strategy adds extra security against data corruption, unintentional deletions, and malicious attacks. Implementing immutable backups reduces the risk of data loss and improves data integrity, making it a crucial component of overall data management methods.
Immutable backup data is protected from potential alterations or deletions, ensuring that its original integrity remains intact.
With the emergence of ransomware, maintaining an immutable backup has become vital for recovery. Threat actors now routinely target backups, protecting data from these types of threats.
Ransomware Is Attacking Your Backups
Cybercriminals are appealing targets for your company’s backup data. With copies of your essential data and systems in their possession, they can demand a ransom.
Furthermore, your backups may not be sufficiently protected or isolated from your primary network, making them prime targets for ransomware assaults. Once threat actors have gained access to your network, they can swiftly find and corrupt backup systems.
They may demand greater ransom payments if they successfully encrypt or erase backups. Businesses may be willing to pay extra if they believe their only option is to rebuild their systems and data from scratch.
Finally, if cyber criminals acquire access to and breach your backups once, they may be able to do it again. This is a continuing threat since attackers can repeatedly target and extort you.
Enhancing Data Resilience Through 5 Key Strategies
So, while an attack may begin with an email, once inside your network, the hackers will attempt to spread the attack wherever feasible, encrypting files along the way—including your email servers and crucial databases. Immutable backups are critical in this situation. Here are five ways they accomplish this.
1. Immutable Backups Are Immune From Attacks
Immutable backups are data copies recorded in a write-once, read-many-times (WORM) format that cannot be altered, tampered with, or deleted by unauthorized users. The backups remain unaffected even if they compromise primary data or backup systems. Hence, we suggest the 3-2-1-1 backup method. The last “1” represents keeping one data copy in immutable storage, protecting it against hostile attacks, accidental deletions, or any other data loss scenario. Immutability thus emerges as a key component of your data resilience strategy, preserving the integrity and availability of vital data assets in the face of various threats.
2. Insider Threats Are Mitigated
The implications of data alteration or deletion, whether deliberate or unintentional, can be financially devastating for enterprises. Employees with access to vital data can potentially cause a data disaster with a few clicks. Immutable backups provide a critical safety net in such situations, ensuring the existence of viable data duplicates. This assurance facilitates rapid recovery, allowing firms to restart operations and lessen the effects of data loss or tampering. Thus, Immutable backups are important in strengthening data resilience strategies, giving organizations peace of mind and resilience against internal threats.
3. Compliance Is Less Complicated
Compliance with government rules, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States, is critical for guaranteeing the integrity and trustworthiness of your business operations. Immutable backups help meet these regulatory obligations by providing an immutable data record.
Organizations can comply with severe data protection rules by keeping data in an immutable format that cannot be updated or tampered with. This helps avoid costly fines and penalties and builds customer faith in your capacity to protect their sensitive information. Immutable backups are a critical component of regulatory compliance activities, ensuring that organizations can retain data integrity and privacy in increasing.
4. Disaster Recovery Is Ensured
Some solutions offer immutable network-attached storage and continuous data protection by taking snapshots every 90 seconds. Each snapshot creates a new object, which captures a snapshot of the file system at that exact instant. Because the underlying objects are immutable, snapshots inherit this property, preserving and protecting data integrity. Furthermore, snapshots provide the important ability to restore entire file systems in minutes by returning to specified periods in time. This functionality protects data and allows quick recovery in the case of data loss or system failure, improving overall data resilience and operational continuity.
5. Data Integrity Is Assured
Immutability validates the integrity of your data. Because your immutable backups cannot be changed, you may compare them to your original data to ensure that no changes occurred. While immutability is your last line of defense, we’ve made it easier to ensure that all of your backups can be recovered by incorporating Arcserve Assured Recovery with Unified Data Protection (UDP).
Assured recovery automates disaster recovery testing for your business-critical systems, apps, and data. It allows you to verify the integrity of data on your replica server. UDP duplicates backup data by recording it as recovery points on one server and transferring them to another. If the source node fails, you may also use backup data to create virtual machines that can serve as standby machines.
Conclusion
Finally, protecting essential company data in an ever-changing threat landscape needs a strong data resilience plan. Immutable backups emerge as a critical component in this strategy, protecting against ransomware attacks and insider threats and guaranteeing compliance while allowing for flawless disaster recovery. Organizations can improve their data resilience by implementing immutable backup solutions, reducing data loss risks and cyber threats. This proactive approach protects operations and maintains reputation, emphasizing the critical relevance of data resilience in today’s digital economy.