Nikhil Korgaonkar, Regional Director, Arcserve India & SAARC
As cybercriminals continue to disrupt business, the question is not if an organization will be attacked, but when.
Many large and small businesses are transitioning to remote/home/office based flexible work. While this is great for productivity and health, it also creates vulnerabilities that cyber attackers can exploit. Ransomware attacks are on the rise as more data is stored in cloud environments, requiring home, office, and field-based employees to access it from less secure home offices and remote environments.
Building a moat around your castle with firewalls, antivirus solutions, multi-factor authentication, intrusion detection and prevention, etc. is a great start, but since most organizational data now resides outside the castle, these Barriers are no longer enough. Even after deploying defense-in-depth, organizations are beginning to realize that they are still vulnerable to cyber-attacks and that their data is still compromised.
According to a research report by CyberPeace Foundation (CPF) and Autobot Infosec, about 1.9 million attacks were recorded in India’s healthcare system this year. This is a cause for concern for the government, which has pursued the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), which aims to develop the backbone necessary to support the country’s integrated digital healthcare infrastructure. Almost a month ago, AIIMS Delhi had him suspended for nearly a week due to a ransomware attack. AIIMS is the premier institution for people and VIPs nationwide. Nearly 1.3 TB of data was encrypted and nearly 5 servers went down while the entire digital system collapsed and operations shifted to manual mode. Personal data, especially medical records, should be kept strictly confidential. When patient medical records and other related data are compromised, people lose trust in healthcare systems that take the digital route.
This is why businesses need a 360-degree view of IT security to protect their data. This means expanding our focus to include data backup and recovery solutions, as well as immutable storage, which has not been our primary focus to date.
Immutable storage is part of the 3-2-1-1 strategy
One of the first steps to take is to adopt a 3-2-1-1 data protection strategy. A 3-2-1-1 strategy dictates that you have three backup copies of your data on two different media, such as disk and tape, with one of them offsite for disaster recovery. The last one in this equation is immutable object storage.
Immutable object storage continuously protects your information by creating snapshots every 90 seconds. Even in the event of a disaster, you can quickly restore your data. An immutable snapshot is a read-only version of the data and file metadata. These snapshots provide point-in-time data recovery. In downtime, natural disasters, or ransomware attacks, snapshots can be used to rollback to previous file states. Immutable snapshots cannot be modified, overwritten, or deleted, preventing loss of data integrity due to human error, hardware failure, or ransomware attacks.
and create a recovery plan
The first step in any cybersecurity strategy is to back up your important data. But just backing up your data is not enough. It would also be nice to have a robust plan for recovering data quickly and cost-effectively after a cyberattack. In fact, without a well-thought-out recovery plan, you may not be able to properly restore exact versions of files or folders after data loss.
Here is one way to think about data backup and recovery. Attempting to restore data without a solid recovery plan is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle after half the pieces are missing. Especially in a crisis situation where you are in a hurry to save your data now because tomorrow may be too late. A good recovery plan can find all the pieces and put them together quickly when every minute counts and not a single moment should be missed.
One-click recovery
Minimizing downtime from cyberattacks can save your business. Therefore, it is imperative to look for a data protection system that is easy to deploy, easy to manage, and stable even under the most dire circumstances. You should be able to achieve a smooth and organized recovery with a single click. This allows you to recover with confidence in the event of a cyberattack by safely spinning up copies of your physical and virtual systems onsite and offsite in minutes instead of hours or days.
Data is your most important asset. If you get ransomware, you are dead in the water. As such, data protection should be an important part of your cybersecurity strategy. With the right approach, you can recover your data quickly and easily after an attack and survive whatever the bad guys throw at you.
