It’s that time again, when everyone gets out their crystal ball to predict what’s going to be hot in their industry for the coming year. Well, forget about the ‘trends’… when it comes to cyber resiliency, there are critical actions that most businesses need to take – and fast. Because you don’t need mystic powers to know that bad actors are coming for your data.
Cyber-attacks are more prevalent, more sophisticated and more dangerous than ever before. Yet, all-too-often, enterprises remain slow, complicated, and disjointed in their efforts to prepare.
By not moving at pace, enterprises are effectively moving backwards. The reality is, that many organisations are less equipped to recover effectively from a cyber-attack today than they were 12 months ago – Because the game has changed, but they haven’t kept up.
If you want to move forwards with cyber resilient backup and recovery this year, then read on. Here’s 5 critical actions for 2023, and you need to start now.
1. Break down silos. Make a joined-up cyber recovery plan.
A 2022 ransomware reports found that 94% of ransomware attacks intended to impact backup repositories – and 68% were successful in doing so.
Too often, responsibility for ‘cyber recovery’ falls down the gap between the security team and the infrastructure team, with neither one truly understanding the detrimental impact modern cyber-attacks can have on their organisation’s ability to recover their backup data until it’s too late.
You need to understand the potential impact of an attack on your ability to recover business critical data and systems, and you need a plan for recovering them quickly, cleanly and completely when the worst happens.
Your plan needs to be realistic, pragmatic, and it needs to be co-owned with both security and infrastructure teams coming together around a shared objective. The first step, is an open and honest conversation with both security and infrastructure stakeholders at the table.
Take the first step:
Schedule a meeting with your security or infrastructure counterpart. Do it today. Do it right now. Start the conversation!
2. Streamline your environment. Get visibility of your recovery risks.
How many backup and recovery software products are you running? …Five? …Ten? How many different technology vendors? How many lines of custom code and hand-cranked reports to provide the insights your stakeholders need?
Backup and recovery infrastructure has become too complicated, too disjointed and too opaque. And that’s a risk in itself. The ability to see and understand your whole environment at any moment in time is now critical in the face of intense and rapidly evolving cyber risks.
Make 2023 the year you unify your backup estate. If you’re an existing IBM Storage Protect user, there’s never been a better time to consolidate your backup with Storage Protect Suite. Thanks to converged storage pools with Open Snap Storage Manager (OSSM), it’s now simpler and more cost-effective than ever to protect your physical and virtual backups with IBM.
But most importantly, with more of your estate protected by Storage Protect Suite, the more you can benefit from Predatar’s ground-breaking cyber analytics and benchmarking tools that are now available from IBM. By continually monitoring your backup environment, Predatar provides users with a cyber resiliency score for their backup environment in real time, providing alerts of new issues and recommending fixes to mitigate cyber risks, so you can address issues before they become big problems.
Take the first step:
Ask your IBM storage rep about consolidating your backup estate with Storage Protect Suite and sign-up for a demo of Predatar’s cyber analytics and benchmarking now.
3. Get recovery confident. Automate repetitive and time-consuming testing.
The only way to know for sure that your backups are virus-free and recoverable is to test them. But frankly, it’s not possible to test your entire backup estate manually. Even if you did have the human resources available to continually run anti-virus and recovery tests, you could never stay on top of the volume of new data being ingested every day.
Automation can help. By continually running antivirus scanning and recovery testing in the background, you can have confidence that your backup data is always clean and recoverable.
This short video explains how automation, machine learning, and leading Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) tools can easily be applied to your IBM backup environment to take the heavy lifting out of finding and removing recovery risks including hidden ransomware and unrecoverable workloads.
Take the first step:
Sign up for a personalised demo of Predatar Cyber Recovery Orchestration now.
4. Apply backup best-practice. Make a third backup copy.
The 3-2-1 methodology is not new, yet many businesses fail to adhere to it. As a reminder 3-2-1- recommends storing 3 copies of your data, on 2 different media types, with at least 1 stored offsite.
This video which explains the principle of a third copy.
There are many ways to implement a third-copy solution. But thanks to Storage Protect multi-site replication and IBM Cloud Object Storage a third copy in the cloud is a relatively simple and cost-effective option.
Immutability and logical airgaps can also be added to your third copy for additional security. By following this approach businesses can minimise the impact of a data breach and significantly increase their chances of successful recovery.
Take the first step:
Speak to your IBM cloud rep or drop us a message at info@predatar.com to talk about the best way to achieve your third copy.
5. Stay on top of backup admin. Stay on top of recovery risks.
In many cases, underinvestment in infrastructure over several years and an ongoing shortage of skilled technical resources have meant that day-to-day best practices haven’t been maintained. For example, regular patching hasn’t been applied, software hasn’t been updated, regular Disaster Recovery (DR) testing hasn’t been completed, and new security features haven’t been enabled. As a result for many businesses their backup estate has become a weak point, full of vulnerabilities.
Staying on top of every day admin is critical, but it’s also a huge challenge. Infrastructure teams are expected to do more than ever before, but with less resources and less budget. Infrastructure team leaders need to review their resources and make an honest assessment. Do they have the bandwidth to stay on top of the growing risk?
Even with automation in place for some of the most time-consuming and repetitive tasks, many businesses will continue to struggle to stay on top of the housekeeping required to maximise resiliency and minimise risk, so it’s no surprise that IDC has identified a new breed of Managed Service Providers (MSPs) emerging, offering to Cyber Recovery as a Service (CRaaS). IDC defines CRaaS as incorporating backup services, archive services, disaster recovery services and cyber recovery services into a holistic offering.
If you are worried about skills and resources for the year ahead, outsourcing could be a good option.
Take the first step:
An expert cyber recovery service provider can help you to assess your options. Drop us a line and we can put you in touch with our network of trusted cyber recovery partners.
Predatar is an IBM technology partner. If you have any questions about boosting the cyber resilience of your IBM Storage Protect or Storage Protect Plus backup estate, please get in touch.
