These days, everyone knows the importance of backing up their data. Everything needs to be backed up — from a laptop to the cloud platform on which many businesses rely. It feels fairly simple. 

Unfortunately, with bad actors finding new ways to attack businesses every day, nothing is ever that easy. Threat actors know good backups are the cheat code to not paying the ransomware, giving victims the ability to rewind the clock to before the attack. With that in mind, the bad guys have begun to actively target backups first.

With all of this in mind, here are a few things IT leaders should keep in mind to ensure their data is protected, and their business keeps on running — no matter what.

All businesses are at risk

The number one mistake a business could make is assuming that they won’t be the victim of a ransomware attack. Hackers have proven time and time again that there is no business too big or small to attack, nor are any industries off limits. 

Every business needs to assume they’re at risk and design their security posture accordingly. This doesn’t just involve ensuring there are tools to detect and mitigate an attack but writing a plan for how to recover quickly and efficiently. 

Basic backup isn’t enough

Organizations are more prone to business downtime now than ever before. Disruptions from cyberattacks, natural disasters, equipment failures, power outages, and other incidents have escalated in frequency and severity in recent years, and organizations continue to bear the brunt of it. While considering the productivity loss and reputational damage that businesses face in addition to financial consequences, downtime can be a death knell for businesses, especially for small and midsize businesses.

To mitigate potential damages and eliminate downtime in the event of an IT disaster, organizations need to have a proactive plan rather than a reactive one. However, most SMBs cannot afford to spend the money, time and resources required to research, implement and test disaster recovery plans. That is why Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) is swiftly gaining prominence. It allows an organization to back up its data (along with IT infrastructure configurations and disaster recovery runbook) in a third-party cloud computing environment. When a disaster strikes, the cloud service provider will provide the business with the DR orchestration necessary to regain access and functionality to the IT infrastructure.

Cloud isn’t immune to cyberattacks

While cloud service providers and platforms (like Microsoft Azure), ensure the security of their infrastructure and network with robust measures, the shared responsibility model of cloud security places the onus of data protection on the respective users and organizations. In today’s rapidly expanding threat landscape, it is thus critical for organizations to secure their data with a powerful third-party backup solution. It will help them comprehensively protect their cloud data while eliminating the single-cloud vulnerabilities and other potential pitfalls associated with leveraging cloud-native services for data backup.

When looking for a cloud data protection solution, be sure it includes the same robust features previously required on-prem. For example,

• Automated recovery testing: Guarantees the recoverability of data through automated testing without impacting production environments.
• Granular restoration: Offers the flexibility to restore entire systems or specific files, ensuring critical data is quickly accessible when needed.
• Ransomware detection: Employs advanced threat detection to identify and alert potential ransomware activities, safeguarding backups from malicious attacks.