What IT Leaders Need To Know About Cyber Secure Backup

When it comes to backing up your organization’s valuable data, many folks are either stuck in old less secure ways or are simply not backing them up correctly – or at all. The point of backing up data is to have it be restored in a company’s system if they lose it somehow either due to cybersecurity attacks, a natural disaster, or data center and system failures. Eric Herzog, Forbes Council Member and Chief Marketing Officer at Infinidat, shares an article explaining from an IT perspective how organizations should go about securing their backed up data. He states, “From an IT perspective, backup targets have usually been measured on how fast they are, their ability to reduce the amount of data backed up and how economical they are for storage. However, ransomware and malware attacks have recently been focusing on backup infrastructure, as well as data on primary storage… Cybercriminals have learned that, to be effective, they need to not only attack data on primary storage but also disrupt backup storage.” Attacking backup storage allows cybercriminals to make a company even more vulnerable when attacking their main servers as well. This would be difficult to nearly impossible for a company to recover from a cyberattack to your backup data. With these new, more sophisticated approaches to attacking backup storage, cybercriminals are slowly “poisoning” the copies of data. With this known tactic, IT leaders and Security divisions at companies are focusing on added cybersecurity to their backup data as well. “In light of this new threat scenario that virtually all enterprises now face, the backup storage needs to take on additional responsibilities, such as expediting near-instantaneous cyber recovery or hosting recoveries with a dual role,” says Herzog. “This is noteworthy because, even if backup storage fights off a ransomware or malware attack, the cyberattack may have already reached production data on IT systems and primary storage. Enterprises need a higher level of cyber resilience to ensure that they are equipped to handle ransomware, malware and other cyberattacks.” According to Herzog, cyber secure backup storage needs to incorporate the following capabilities: immutability of data, high availability, data encryption, multifactor authentication, automation or a certain level of artificial intelligence, and cyber storage guaranteed service level agreements (SLAs). He concludes that it is best to look for cyber secure backup storage that utilizes the same underlying operating system that facilitates speedy backups. This varies based on your specific enterprise’s requirements and you may need a software-defined system that maximizes available storage capacity and offers data deduplication, such as a purpose-built backup appliance. But for those enterprises that have a higher priority on the backup target hosting application and data recovery, Herzog notes that choosing a primary storage platform that is repositioned as a backup target is the more appropriate choice.

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